From Renoir to Chagall: A Journey Through French Painting

T here is a particular quality of light that falls across a Normandy cliff-top in late summer—thin, silvered, forever shifting. It is the kind of light that can undo a painter's certainties, and it very nearly undid those of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). By the mid-1880s, after a decade spent chasing the fleeting and the momentary as one of Impressionism's leading lights, the French artist had begun to want something else entirely: not the instant, but the eternal.

It is tempting to imagine the history of French art as a straight line from the boulevards of Paris to the beaches of the Riviera. In truth it runs more like a river delta—doubling back, forking, pooling in unlikely harbour towns and hillside villas—before finally, decades later, spilling out into the honeyed light of the South. Each stop along the way left its mark on the canvases produced there: a certain chalkiness of light in the north, a warmer looseness of hand further south, as though the land itself were dictating the terms of the brush. To follow it is to follow the artists themselves: north to windswept cliffs, west to a fortified Atlantic port, south to olive groves and, at last, to a hillside garden in Vence where a Russian émigré in his sixties, newly settled after years of wartime exile, turned his attention to the humble gladiolus and found in it something close to a prayer.

A group of works tracing precisely this route will come to auction at Sotheby's Hong Kong this September, across both the Day and Evening auctions—each one centred on themes of flora, fauna and the pastoral landscape, and together offering a window into France's enduring role as an artistic hub and wellspring of inspiration.

Our journey begins not in Paris but on its outer edge, where Renoir kept returning through the 1880s to the windswept estates of friends and patrons along the Channel coast. It was here, amid chalk cliffs and shifting weather, that Renoir first confessed to having reached the limits of Impressionism—to having, in his own estimation, exhausted it entirely.

The result was a quiet revolution of his own making. Renoir began to draw again, properly, obsessively—outlining, modelling, disciplining the loose shimmer that had made his name. Out of this crisis came Jeune Fille au chapeau de paille (1884), one of a series of idealised female portraits from what admirers would later call his “Ingresque” years, after the neoclassical draughtsman Ingres. The young woman in her wide straw hat, blouse slipping from one shoulder, is rendered with a pearliness of skin and a deliberateness of line that owes as much to the Renaissance—one thinks, distantly, of Titian—as to anything on the Boulevard des Capucines. She is not a moment. She is a meditation on womanhood itself, suspended somewhere between sensuality and marble stillness.

By the early summer of 1890, Renoir had travelled far from the Norman cliffs to the fortified port of La Rochelle, on France's Atlantic flank. There was something in the salt air and the hard southern light that loosened him again—after years of rigour, his hand grew warmer, freer, more experimental. Poudrerie de La Rochelle (circa 1896) is the record of that thaw: a lone figure seated before the whitewashed bulk of the old gunpowder magazine, its geometry softened by trees and dappled shade, the whole canvas held in a delicate balance between architectural gravity and atmospheric ease. Renoir seems, here, to be negotiating a truce between the two halves of his artistic self—the draughtsman who had spent years disciplining his line, and the colourist who had never quite been silenced. It is a painting caught mid-breath, poised between the rigour he had just spent a decade mastering and the luminosity he was about to rediscover.

That same year, in Paris, Renoir married Aline Charigot, the model and companion who had shared his life for a decade—a union that coincided with a period of growing recognition for the artist, as dealers and collectors alike began to take a serious interest in his work. Within two years, the French state itself would make its first official purchase from him: Jeunes Filles au Piano, acquired in 1892 for the Musée du Luxembourg, a moment Renoir would count among the great vindications of his career.

It was in this same span of years, the late 1880s stretching into the early 1890s, that Renoir turned his attention outward, travelling extensively through the French countryside, sketching landscapes he would later complete in the quiet of his Paris studio. Paysage avec figures (1890-93) belongs to this restless, wandering period, when Renoir began folding his favourite subject—carefree, fashionably dressed young women—directly into sun-drenched pastoral settings, so that figure and field seem to breathe the same air. The effect is one of unhurried, timeless leisure, as though the sitters themselves had wandered in from an eternal summer.

The journey south reached its natural terminus at Cagnes-sur-Mer, where an ageing Renoir settled amid olive groves and warm Mediterranean light, his hands increasingly stiffened by illness but his eye for the pastoral undimmed. It was here, around 1910, that he turned repeatedly to the washerwomen labouring along the riverbanks near his home—a subject he treated not as anecdote but as a form of a rural sculpture, bodies bent in rhythmic, timeless labour, the humble task elevated almost to the status of ritual. Laveuses-Fragment (1910) distils this fascination: two women at their washing, their crouched forms folded so completely into the landscape that one struggles to say where figure ends and countryside begins. Water, light and human motion dissolve into a single, pastoral continuity.

A generation later, the light of the South drew a different kind of émigré. Moïse Kisling (1891–1953), born in Kraków and settled among the Montparnasse avant-garde, returned time and again to Provence and the Côte d'Azur, sketching outdoors before retreating to Paris to complete his canvases at scale. In Paysage de Provence (1921), a deep, almost nocturnal ground sets off passages of peacock green and warm ochre, while a few urgent, angular strokes—a nod to his early flirtations with Cubism—trace branches bent and twisted, as if by a Mediterranean wind. It is landscape painted with the temperament of a man who had lived among Picasso's circle: structured, yet unmistakably ablaze.

By the time Bernard Buffet (1928–1999) came to settle permanently in Provence, he was already one of France's most famous—and most fiercely debated—painters, his angular, black-lined Expressionism having made him a star of the post-war Paris scene almost before he was thirty. His romance with the South had begun decades earlier, in the late 1950s, when a stay near Aix-en-Provence led him to Saint-Tropez and to Annabel, the writer and actress who would become his wife and lifelong muse. But it was not until 1986, after years spent largely in the north, that Buffet and Annabel found the house that would hold him for the rest of his life: the Domaine de la Baume, a Provençal manor set among forty hectares of vineyard and scrubland near Tourtour, a hill village in the Haut-Var known locally as “the village in the sky.”

The move marked the beginning of Buffet's final chapter. Increasingly withdrawn from public life, he rarely left the property, and La Baume became at once his subject and his sanctuary—the house, its ochre façades, its small-paned windows and its garden furnished with a stone terrace and fountain, appearing time and time again in the canvases of his last decade. Annabel would later describe his approach to the place as akin to painting a portrait of someone deeply loved: not a record of architecture, but a study of intimacy, returned to obsessively, from every angle and every season. La Baume, la terrasse, et la fontaine (1987), painted the year after the couple's arrival, belongs to the very beginning of that cycle—Buffet's unmistakable black contours drawing out the geometry of stone balustrade and basin, the whole scene steeped in the warm ochre that had, by then, become the true colour of his South.

The southward pilgrimage found its final resting place in Vence, where Marc Chagall (1887–1985) arrived in the years following his wartime exile in America, settling at last into a hillside villa he called Les Collines. Flowers were, for Chagall, never simply flowers—and gladioli least of all. In Les Glaïeuls (1950), the blooms rise in sequence from stem to crown, sword-leaved and upright, carrying with them the artist's lifelong fascination with flora as a vessel for feeling: passion, devotion, the solemnity of a vow.

That inheritance persists in the work of Jean-Pierre Cassigneul (b. 1935). In Cassigneul’s women in floral hats—rendered in vibrant colour and smoke-soft outline—one can trace an unbroken thread back to the Nabis painters Bonnard and Vuillard, and to the sensuous portraiture of Kees van Dongen.  Les Premiers Jours belongs to this lineage: proof that the pastoral idyll first glimpsed on a Norman cliff-top has never really left French painting at all—it has simply kept walking south, gathering new light and new colour as it goes, and is, perhaps, walking still.