Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Ambroise Vollard , Paris

A.J. McNeill Reid, London

The Lefevre Gallery (Alex. Reid & Lefevre), London

Arthur Tooth & Sons, Ltd., London

V.H. Deuchar (sold: Sotheby's, London, March 30, 1977, lot 5)

Private Collection, Switzerland (by 1996)

Amsterdam, E.J. Van Wisselingh, Exposition de Peinture, 1938, no. 20

Montreal, W. Scott and Son, Delacroix à Dufy, 1938, no. 26

London, The Lefevre Gallery (Alex. Reid & Lefevre), Renoir, 1948, no. 16

Tübingen, Kunsthalle, Renoir, 1996, no. 75

Treviso, Casa dei Carraresi, L’impressionismo el’eta di Van Gogh, 2002-03, no. 67

Ambroise Vollard, Tableaux, Pastels et Dessins de Pierre Auguste Renoir, vol. II, Paris, 1918, illustrated p. 136

Ambroise Vollard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paintings, Pastels and Drawings, San Francisco, 1989, no. 1481, illustrated p. 304

Les Environs de Varengeville was executed in 1885, at the time when Renoir had achieved a degree of financial success.  This newly found economic security gave the artist freedom to move away from commissioned portraits, and to embark to a larger extent on painting en plein air, preferring the freshness of natural light to working in his studio.  Renoir took the opportunity in the beginning of the 1880s to travel to Algeria and Italy, where the light of the Mediterranean and of North Africa further inspired him to paint outdoor subjects.  When in France, he tended to leave Paris and spend his time in the countryside along the Seine, or at the Bérard family house in Wargemont, painting the local scenery.  In these landscapes, however, Renoir’s interest was not in depicting remote locations, but rather the leisure activities of the Parisians in harmony with their surroundings.  

Writing about Renoir’s landscapes of the late 1870s and early 1880s, John House observed:  "It was not the specific sites that attracted his interest, but rather certain types of subject characteristic of the meeting-points of city and country: the entertainment places in particular, and also the bridges where road and rail crossed the river, the houses and villas which punctuated the fields, river-banks and old villages.  Even the open countryside, when he painted it during the 1870s, does not appear as a remote refuge, but seems accessible to the casual passer-by or the day-tripper.  By choosing such overtly contemporary subjects for his landscapes and subject pictures, Renoir was clearly signalling his rejection of the types of subject which won favour with the authorities at the Salon in the 1870s: the standard images of landscape and the agricultural countryside presented scenes untouched by urbanisation and modernisation" (John House, Renoir: Master Impressionist, Sydney, 1994, p. 16).