The fragmentary evidence we have from Renoir's early career tells a rather different story. In the late i86os and early 18705 he was a close associate of many of the painters who were posing the most radical challenges to the artistic authorities of the period. He was especially close to Claude Monet and was one of a group of artists that looked to Edouard Manet as its leader. Moreover, the subjects Renoir chose to paint suggest an active engagement with many of the central issues in the contemporary art world, specifically an acute awareness of the question of modernity in painting, of how the everyday experiences of mod- ern city life might be transformed into fine art. The present account of La Promenade will seek to restore the picture to its original contexts. Of course, in a literal sense this is impossible. The painter's original intentions cannot be reclaimed, any more than can the responses to the painting of its first—now-unknown—viewers. However, we can explore the frameworks within which the picture was made. How did Renoir's choice of this theme and the ways in which he treated it relate to the art of his contemporaries and to contemporary debates about the purpose of fine art and its role in society? Here, though, the relevant contexts must be determined. Traditional histories of the period have viewed Renoir's early work, like that of his col- 4 leagues, as the beginnings of the history of Impressionism. Such histories have examined the pictures primarily in relation to the central concerns that charac- terized the Impressionist movement as it emerged in the mid-iSyos: an informal and seemingly spontaneous way of painting, and a concern with effects of out- door light and atmosphere. In accounts like this, the relevant context is largely confined to the activities of the group to which Renoir belonged. The artists are presented as a self-contained avant-garde, whose primary point of reference was 5 the art of their colleagues. Views such as this are anachronistic, more appropriate to the discus- sion of artistic groupings in the twentieth century, when the institutional struc- tures of the art world changed and the notion of the avant-garde became securely established. Certainly, as will be shown, the artists of Manet's circle were viewed as a distinctive group in the late i86os, but their distinctiveness was defined by comparison and contrast with other artists working in different modes. The paintings produced by members of the circle reveal their close and 2