“[Renoir] had a passion for everything that bears the mark of the French genius: order and balance in art, claritys of ideas, simplicity of style.”
An exceptionally dynamic work, Renoir’s Paysage de bord de mer exemplifies Renoir’s masterful harmony of light and color and displays an invigorated sense of motion. Dated circa 1884, the present work captures Renoir's newly reinvented style following his travels to Algeria and Italy in the early part of the decade (see fig. 1), and furthered during his subsequent trips to Normandy and England.
The present seascape likely depicts cliffs off the coast of the English Channel, a region known for its craggy coastline and blustery seas. While scholars have yet to precisely identify the location of the present work, its historic attributions to the English isle of Guernsey and the Normand coastline near Dieppe both align with the Renoir's travels during the period as well as the depiction of the rugged topography (see figs. 2-3).
Right: FIG. 3 POSTCARD OF Berneval, Normandy, CIRCA 1900s
In 1883, Renoir extended his annual trip to Normandy by three weeks, traveling across the English Channel and stopping briefly in Jersey before landing on the small island of Guernsey. With his partner Aline Charigot and fellow artist Paul Lhote, Renoir stayed but a short walk from the Bay of Moulin Huet—"the most famous resort for artists.” Writing to Durand-Ruel at the t.mes , Renoir spoke excitedly of returning to France “with several canvases as well as documents for pictures to be made in Paris” (quoted in Exh. Cat., London, The National Gallery; Ottawa, The National Gallery of Canada; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Renoir Landscapes, 1865-1883, 2007-08, p. 73).
Many of the English landscapes and seascapes from this period were first begun in Guernsey in the summer of 1883 and later finished in the artist’s new studio followed his return to Paris. Accordingly, it is possible that the initial studies and “documents” of which Renoir wrote about provided the inspiration for the present work. By 1884, the artist had also spent many annual sojourns in Normandy, often staying at the home of his friend and patron Paul Berard in Wargemont, a small village just off the coast of the English Channel. Located a few kilometers from the marit.mes towns of Berneval-le-Grand and Dieppe, Wargemont provided the artist with easy access to a variety of pastoral and coastal landscapes that featured in many of his works from this period. Renoir's iconic image of Pêcheuses de moules à Berneval, côte normand from 1879 are among the earliest depictions of the region (see fig. 4).
"Renoir paints like he breathes. Painting has become for him the act that complements looking."
Fig. 6 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Moulin Huet Bay, Guernsey, 1883. The National Gallery, London
Fig. 7 Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Hills around the Bay of Moulin Huet, Guernsey, 1883. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Like Paysage de bord de mer the works created along the English Channel are a test.mes nt to Renoir’s inventive, ambitious and ever-adaptive style (see figs. 5-7). As his brother Edmond once said, “In not one of his works, perhaps, does he adopt the same manner of painting” (quoted in ibid.). Varied as they are, Renoir’s paintings from the early 1880s show an enhanced exuberance, his compositions enlivened with the increasingly complex interplay of colors as well as a heightened sense of movement through the artist’s varied daubs, dashes and strokes of paint. After the apex of Impressionism in the late 1870s, Renoir’s painterly innovations were further encouraged by his t.mes spent painting en plein air alongside Monet in December 1883, when the two traveled along the Mediterranean coast of France, Monaco and Italy (see fig. 8). Though such lush and luminous works are highly sought-after today, this period in the early 1880s found Renoir at a moment of crisis.
"What lovely landscapes, with distant horizons and the most beautiful colors… the delicacies of hue are extraordinary… alas, our poor palette can’t match up to it."
As the artist later recounted to Ambroise Vollard: "A sort of break came in my work about 1883. I had wrung Impressionism dry, and I finally came to the conclusion that I knew neither how to paint nor draw" (quoted in John House, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation, New Haven, 2012, p. 113). In Italy, the artist had witnessed first-hand the grand frescoes and great works of Renaissance masters like Raphael. He soon felt compelled by the classical depictions and their characteristic claritys of form and line and began to doubt the focus on the ephemeral that had so guided him in years past. Accordingly, by the mid-1880s, Renoir's feathery Impressionistic brushwork had been largely supplanted by more subtle gradations of pigments and crisp, almost sculptural delineation of form—the latter of which lent an enhanced sense of permanence of works like Paysage de bord de mer .
In the present work, Renoir captures the emphatic sense of motion achieved his finest Impressionist works while also rendering the rocky topography with a solidity and sense of volume not seen in those early paintings. The sea and sky in Paysage de bord de mer come alive in vibrant crystalline hues of blue and pink, diaphanously rendered in swathes of thinned oil paint. The silken brushwork in the mid- and background is balanced in turn by the artist’s structured delineation of the boulders at the fore of the landscape. Renoir builds mass in the foreground with his wide directional brushwork and dark outlines, enhanced by shadows of aquatic blue along the ground. The surreal and sublime coloration conjures a sort of Arcadian idyll—the concept of which the artist first explored in the early 1880s and one which would later dominate the artist’s post-1900 oeuvre. Years later, Monet's landscapes of Dieppe (see fig. 9) would also reiterate Renoir's daring treatment of the coastal landscapes exemplified in works like Paysage de bord de mer .
In the decade following the execution of Paysage de bord de mer , Renoir would come to meet the young Ambroise Vollard (see fig. 10), an ambitious fledgling dealer originally from l'île de La Réunion. By this t.mes , Renoir had reached the pinnacle of his career, having earned a comfortable living and station among the bourgeoisie largely through his portraiture. By contrast, Vollard was twenty-seven years his junior and still growing his business as a contemporary dealer in Paris. Despite the difference in age and place in their careers, the two soon formed a close kinship, in no small part due to their shared perceptions as outsiders—Renoir having come from the working classes, and Vollard from a colonial French isle. Though Renoir was already represented by both Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune at the t.mes , the artist gradually began to offer his works to Vollard as well. It was indeed Renoir who introduced Vollard to Cézanne—an artist whom Durand-Ruel refused to represent at the t.mes . Vollard would later go on to sell more than two-thirds of Cézanne’s total output, generating enormous wealth and clout for the dealer and cementing his status as one of the greatest dealers of modern history.
In the years that followed their first.mes eting, Vollard would continue to promote Renoir's career by commissioning numerous prints from the artist, acquiring his works from other galleries and auctions and even encouraging new modes of creation, as he did with Renoir's first sculptures in 1907 and the later collaboration with the sculptor Richard Guino. First acquired by Vollard from the artist in 1907, Paysage de bord de mer was subsquently acquired by Etienne Bignou and Martin Fabiani following the dealer’s sudden death in 1939. Fabiani and Bignou in turn sold the work to Kaiser-Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany in February 1941. After the war, the painting was returned to France, first entering the collects ion of the Jeu de Paume in 1951 and later transferred to Musée d’Orsay in 1986, where it has remained until its return to the Vollard heirs in February 2023.
Renoir's Legacy: Museum Works from the Historic collects ion of Ambroise Vollard
