Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Durand-Ruel, Paris
M. Knoedler & Co., New York
Private Collection, North America (acquired from the above on February 9, 1946)
Thence by descent

New York, Durand-Ruel, Renoir, 1914, no. 15
New York, Durand-Ruel, Renoir, 1918, no. 7

Gustave Coquiot, Renoir, Paris, 1925, p. 230 (dated 1890)
Julius Meier-Graefe, Renoir, Leipzig, 1929, no. 229, illustrated p. 251 (titled Pont Aven III)
Michel Drucker, Renoir, Paris, 1944, no. 117, illustrated pl. 117 (titled L'Embouchure de l'Aven)
Elda Fezzi, Tout l'oeuvre peint de Renoir, période impressionniste 1869-1883, Paris, 1985, no. 629, illustrated p. 115
Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville, Renoir, Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, vol. II, Paris, 2009, no. 866, illustrated p. 109

The canvas is lined and the edges are reinforced with tape. Areas of impasto are well preserved and the colors are bright and fresh and the surface is clean. Under UV light a few pindots of retouching are visible along the extreme right edge and a few barely visible pindots are scatted in the sky, otherwise fine. This work is in very good condition.
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The end of the nineteenth century was a particularly fruitful time for Renoir, a period when he began to achieve a degree of economic success. Newfound recognition as an Impressionist painter, not to mention the direct support of dealer Durand-Ruel, permitted Renoir a sense of financial security as an artist for the first time in his career, thus enabling his exploration of more challenging and unfamiliar areas of creative interest. Renoir yearned to venture beyond the conveying of a narrative through portraiture and instead he began painting en plein air, finding inspiration in the freshness of natural light.

Pont Aven is an idyllic and evocative vision which embodies the fresh spontaneity of Renoir’s plein-air painting. The artist adopted a Venetian stylistic approach, encouraging a sense of intimacy between color and light to produce a similarly harmonious relationship between space and volume. The present work depicts a country landscape with lush green and rich copper tones, sailboats visible in the distance. Unlike his colleagues, for example Monet and Pissarro, who depicted laborers embedded in landscapes, Renoir preferred to focus on scenes of leisure.

Writing about Renoir’s landscapes of the late 1870s and early 1880s, John House observes, "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)