Paysage

The present work belongs to a series of bold, experimental landscape paintings inspired by the countryside surrounding his newly built home at Les Collettes. Paysage portrays the sunbathed vegetation of the French Mediterranean coast. In its immediacy and freedom of execution, the painting almost borders on abstraction: with a few strokes of paint and a carefully orchestrated balance of blues and greens with reds and oranges, Renoir managed to capture the vivid presence of a southern, idyllic landscape. These works would prove influential for the subsequent generation of artists: Henri Matisse, who visited the artist in 1918, wrote to his wife: "I have just come back from Renoir's house where I have seen some marvellous paintings" (quoted in Renoir au XX siècle, exh. cat., Grand Palais, Paris, 2009, p. 381).
Paysage demonstrates Renoir's successful reconciliation of plein-air painting and artistic tradition in the landscapes and informal outdoor scenes that he executed during the early 1890s. In his later works, Renoir sought to integrate the figure into its surroundings with his soft palette and feathery touches of paint, which heighten the mood of harmony and contented relaxation. "Sometimes we see women washing clothes in a stream, but most frequently they are just seated in their natural surroundings. They rarely engage actively with the landscapes in which they are set; it is the viewer who sees the panorama beyond them...the inactivity and passivity of the figures mean that these cannot be seen as genre paintings, in the sense of paintings of everyday life...In these paintings, figures and landscape become one—a pictorial celebration of the splendor of visual experience" (M. Lucy and J. House, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation, New Haven, 2012, p. 227).