Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Estate of the artist
Private Collection, Japan (acquired circa the 1970s)
Thence by descent

Bernheim-Jeune, ed., L'Atelier de Renoir, vol. II, Paris, 1931, no. 687, illustrated pl. 217
Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville, Renoir, Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, vol. V, Paris, 2014, no. 3882, illustrated p. 152

Canvas is unlined. The edges are reinforced with tape. Under UV light a few pindots and hairstrokes of inpainting appear around the extreme perimeter of the work, otherwise fine. This work is in very good condition.
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This vibrant landscape is exemplary of Renoir’s late pastoral scenes, where flurries of color and wild brushwork create an image of visceral, unbridled nature. However, unusually for an artist whose landscapes normally feature bathers, readers, walkers or prominent architecture, man’s presence is absent in the present composition. Yet Renoir, his brushstrokes visible in the patches of thick impasto, does strive to make his own presence felt, trying to cross the breach between the civilized and the wild, the tamed and the untameable. Indeed, this whole painting is an exercise in balance; for every florid detail Renoir provides a patch of sketchy nothingness; every jubilant yellow finds its match in a dash of violet; for each green, a slash of scarlet sits nearby. Each of these opposites (and the compromises Renoir creates between them) serves the purpose of Renoir’s landscape as a whole, which tries to temper reality with representation, and a very dynamic subject matter with a static medium. It is this vitality that Vincent van Gogh had so admired in Renoir’s work. Writing to his brother Théo in 1885, he had said that Renoir reminded him that “there is life in every pencil stroke,” casting a different light on the artistic dialogue between the two painters (quoted in Keith Wheldon, Renoir and his Art,New York, 1975, p. 120, see fig. 1). By the time Paysage aux environs des collettes, près de Cagnes was painted in 1919, Renoir’s vivacity was much matured; his painting is bursting with even more rhythm and vibrating color than his earlier landscapes. His desire for “people to feel that neither my figures nor my trees are flat” is certainly fulfilled in this landscape (quoted in Renoir (exhibition catalogue), New York, 1985, p. 278).