Footnotes

This work will be included in the forthcoming Pierre-Auguste Renoir Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc.

Provenance
Ambroise Vollard Collection, Paris (acquired directly from the artist before 1919).
Private collection; their sale, Piasa, Paris, 27 June 2007, lot 11.
Private collection, Portugal (acquired at the above sale).
Thence by descent to the present owners.

Exhibited
Marseilles, Musée Cantini, Renoir, Peintre et Sculpteur, 8 June - 15 September 1963, no. 27.

Literature
A. Vollard, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paintings, Pastels and Drawings, San Francisco, 1989, no. 702 (illustrated p. 176)
G-P. & M. Dauberville, Renoir, catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels et aquarelles, Vol. IV, 1903-1910, Paris, 2012, no. 2931 (illustrated p. 150).

Painted around 1910, the present work issues from a time of great success for the mature Renoir, who by the early twentieth century was firmly established as one of the leading artists of the Impressionist movement. Paysage (Repos sous l'arbre, Cagnes-Sur-Mer) depicts the countryside around Les Collettes, the farm the artist and his family moved to in search of a warmer climate, and upon the advice of his doctor to aid the rheumatism which had struck at the height of his career. Located on the hillside overlooking the medieval town of Cagnes on the Mediterranean coast, Renoir was so captivated by Les Collettes' rural nature that he left the original buildings untouched and instead built a new house and studio in the grounds for his family to move into in 1908.

Renoir's interest in the landscape genre was reignited by the lush coastal landscape which became a rich source of inspiration, with his vibrant depictions of the olive groves, sun-drenched garden and endless blue skies hailed as amongst the most radiant of his oeuvre. The strong Mediterranean sunlight encouraged Renoir to brighten his already vivid palette and led to an increasing use of red and umber in all its nuances to capture the ruddy Provencal earth. The scarlet of the figure's skirts in the present work is answered in the red tree trunk behind her and the warm glow the sun casts on her face, while the cool blue shadows of her blouse echo the arching sky overhead. The trees around her softly curve inwards, acting as a framing device and reinforcing the sense of the figure's gentle absorption into the landscape around her.

The burnt ground, verdant greens and brilliant blue sky of a Mediterranean summer can be felt in the composition, whose whole appears enveloped in a warm golden tone, perhaps denoting late afternoon and a time for repose. In capturing a moment of everyday life, the artist seeks to ennoble and elevate it: 'I love painting that has something of the eternal...but unspoken; an eternity of the everyday, captured on the nearest street corner; the maid stops cleaning her pots for a moment and suddenly becomes Juno on Mount Olympus!' (G. Adriani, Renoir, Cologne, 1999, p. 43).

Renoir typically eschewed black as a colour and instead, as beautifully illustrated in the present work, modelled shadows with emerald greens and deep russets, allowing the eye to dance across the composition uninterrupted. Albert André described the artist's practice thus: 'He prepares areas of the canvas that will be luminous by applying pure white directly onto the canvas. He reinforces shadows and half-tints in the same manner. He almost never mixes the colors on his palette, which is covered with oily squiggles of almost pure tones' (Albert André quoted in A. Wofsy, Renoir's Atelier, San Francisco, 1989, foreword). A sense of continual movement is further evoked in the composition through Renoir's bold, loose brushwork, whereby the ground is enlivened just as much as the trees with their wonderful impasto.

Despite this modern approach to colour and brushwork, Renoir would remain somewhat apart from his Impressionist contemporaries who painted the modern world as they saw it, unembellished and un-idealised. Renoir's oeuvre maintained a distance from artistic doctrine, politics or the developments in photography and cinema which influenced so many others. His timeless compositions offered a refuge from the contemporary world and indeed, by the time the present work was painted, Renoir was increasingly looking back to eighteenth century classicism. Upon settling on the shores of the Mediterranean he rediscovered his love of classical antiquity, as well as his early interest in artists such as Watteau, Fragonard and Delacroix, whose works he had studied at the Louvre as a young student. Renoir told Albert André that the distant mountains at Cagnes reminded him of Watteau's backgrounds, just as the true blue of the sky recalled the velvet-like firmaments of the older master's compositions. Renoir's travels through Europe in the mid-1880s and his study of the ancient painters also had a profound effect on his work. He sought to add an increasing monumentality and delineation to the more dappled and transitory compositions which had defined his early Impressionist years and rearranged the topography of the landscape before him to instil balance and harmony.

Renoir acknowledged his admiration of and debt to eighteenth century art when discussing his Cagnes landscapes with René Gimpel in 1918: 'A painter can't be great if he doesn't understand landscape. Landscape, in the past, has been a term of contempt, particularly in the eighteenth century; but still, that century that I adore did produce some landscapists. I'm one with the eighteenth century. With all modesty, I consider not only that my art descends from a Watteau, a Fragonard, a Hubert Robert, but also that I am one with them' (Renoir, exh. cat., op. cit., p. 277).