Renoux also painted landscapes, large-scale battle scenes, and historical subjects, works which uniquely prepared him for the final phase of his career, the creation of spectacular dioramas, the "moving pictures" of the era.

Whatever his training, by 1822, the year Renoux turned 27, his talents as a painter had attracted the patronage of the antiquarian Alexandre du Sommerard, whose collection of medieval art and artifacts would become the Musée de Cluny.

[4] The book, an illustrated tour of medieval churches and abbeys, many of them reduced to ruins in the violence of the French Revolution, was part of an artistic and literary movement, the troubadour style, that romanticized the Middle Ages in France.

These included the two paintings cited by Maury, Vue prise dans l'église de Louviers and Ruines des casemates du château Gaillard, the latter described in the catalogue: "As a result of the persecutions he was experiencing, Nicolas Poussin, forced to leave his country, comes to take a last look at his birthplace.

It is M. Renoux who was commissioned to complete this interior," consisting of furniture, armor, and numerous objets d'art from the Middle Ages; "finally everything comes together to make this painting a precious piece.

The architecture itself serves as a frame, like a proscenium arch in a theater, for an image of repeating columns and arches that recede into the distance, which my terminate in an opening onto blue sky; greater attention is devoted to architectural features, especially the play of light and shadow on weathered stone, than to the human figures, who are dwarfed by their surroundings; and the artist signs his last name and the year at an angle, as if the letters and numbers were painted upon a stone surface within the picture.

A French scholar notes that Renoux "uses the effects of light contrasts and shaded lines of architecture to create games of abstract construction and repetition, in the manner of Nordic painters (one thinks of Hendryck van Steenwick the Younger in particular).

"[15] The Romanesque and Gothic ruins, underground passages, chapels, convents, vaulted cellars, crypts and galleries depicted by Renoux were inspired by his travels through France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy.

"[19] With his eye for perspective, skill at depicting fine details, and mastery of painting at very large scale, Renoux was an ideal artist for the spectacular diorama theaters created in the 1820s by Daguerre and Bouton.

[21]Renoux created "several double-effect diorama pieces, among them The Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, The Interior of the Abbey Church of St. Owen, Rouen, and View of Heidelberg."

His signature was among the 213 on a petition of 1840 demanding reform of the juried selection process for the annual Paris Salon, which many artists felt had become corrupted by favoritism and factional rivalries.

Among his students at the Ecole des Beaux Arts were Augustin Bader, Narcisse Berchère, Antoine Drulin, Hector Hanoteau,[24] Auguste-Leon Mellé, Jean-Gaspar Myeire, Philippe Rondé, and Henri-Gustave Saltzmann [fr].

[25] Renoux's continuing appeal to connoisseurs and collectors is explained by the art historian Jacques Thuillier: The romanticism of this painter does not turn to gloomy subjects or to the very intellectual pessimism then cultivated by so many poets.