Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Paintings in wartime

When air raids intensified in 1940, it was decided that the paintings should be reunited for safekeeping (as described here in a National Gallery Wartime Review). The search for a secure underground location, big enough to house the entire collection, got underway...

By September 1940, a site had been found. The underground caverns of Manod Quarry (a disused slate mine near Blaenau Ffestiniog, Wales) were chosen as the new subterranean home for the collection, and extensive works were undertaken to prepare the site.

By 1942 bombing raids had lessened and, back in London, public desire to see pictures from the collection return to the Gallery was growing. In a letter sent to The Times  it was suggested that a selection of the 'nation's masterpieces' be returned to London for display.

Later that year it was decided that certain paintings would make the long journey back from Wales to London. The chosen paintings would travel to London in pairs, and one picture would go on public display in the Gallery each month.

These displays continued until the end of the war. The 37th and final picture chosen to return to London from Wales was Renoir's 'The Umbrellas'. But why might the Gallery's Director at the time, Kenneth Clark, have chosen this painting as the final wartime Picture of the Month.

'The Umbrellas' was a painting which differed greatly from those that had been displayed before it. Many of the previously chosen paintings depicted subject matter of a religious or mythological nature – which, it was thought, may resonate most strongly during a time of crisis.

Painted in the late 19th century, ‘The Umbrellas’ was the only Impressionist painting to appear as a wartime Picture of the Month.

Perhaps as the war was coming to an end, this painting presented an opportunity to display something very different - marking the close of the war and paving the way for the evacuated paintings' return to their home in Trafalgar Square?