Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Marcel Midy, Paris (acquired in the 1930s).
Private collection, France (by descent)

M. Bernheim-Jeune, L'Atelier de Renoir, Paris, 1931, p. 242, no. 526 (illustrated, pl. 164). 

Pavia, Scuderie del Castello Visconteo di Pavia, Renoir: La vie en peinture, 15 September - 16 December 2012

Needing a mild climate more conducive to his state of health, in 1903 Pierre-Auguste Renoir moved with his family to the south of France, to Cagnes-sur-Mer and to the "Domaine des Collettes", a small farm on the coast east of Cagnes. Planted with olive and orange trees, the property provided him with his main sources of inspiration.

'La maison vue de la ferme' painted in 1915, is evidence of Renoir's intention to remain authentic and continue to paint this semi-rural universe. Contrary to the traditional idealistic approach, his treatment of nature is very honest. He does not seek in his compositions to tame nature but to understand it, to identify its imperfections, to reveal it as it appears to him using a technique of increasingly fluid oil, making his compositions both light and luminous.

In 1908, J.F. Schnerb said of the artist: "Renoir more and more loves the canvas being full and sonorous. He detests empty spaces. Every corner in his landscapes offers a relationship of colours and values chosen with a view to the embellishment of the surface. His recent studies of the provençal landscape have led him to transpose the themes furnished by nature into the most sonorous colour range and to assemble the largest possible number of elements in the canvas, like a musician who ceaselessly adds new elements to his orchestra." (Quoted in J. House, Renoir 1880-1919, exhibition catalogue, The Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, pp. 276-277).