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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue critique of Pierre-Auguste Renoir being prepared by the Wildenstein Institute established from the archives of François Daulte, Durand-Ruel, Venturi, Vollard and Wildenstein.
Renoir spent the summer months between 1879-1880 at the country château of one of his most important patrons and life-long friend, Paul-Antoine Bérard, in Wargemont on the Normandy coast. His visits to the small towns and villages along the Channel coastline and the landscape paintings he produced were a welcomed respite from the commissioned portraiture he was obliged to paint for rich Parisians in order to earn a living. His enthusiasm for the expansive horizons and the vastness of the sea, sky and coastline is apparent in the present painting from 1879, Marine à Berneval. Here we see the artist delighting in the freedom he is afforded in depicting the writhing and crashing waves and the wildness of nature—contained only by the swath of blue sky and wispy clouds overhead.
The idea of painting the force of a single wave was a theme that had been depicted earlier by such artists as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet and Victor Hugo. In fact, Gustave Courbet, who generally focused his depictions of the sea on a single wave, wrote to Victor Hugo in 1864 expounding on the diverse personalities of the ocean: "The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of a laughing tiger; in its sad moods it recalls the crocodile's tears and, in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up" (P. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, Chicago, 1992, p. 249, no. 64-18).
John House explained that it was in Wargemont where Renoir was able to focus his paintings for the first time on landscapes untouched by modernity and urbanization: “In some of his paintings there, he showed the rolling terrain of the Normandy cliff tops…but in others he focused on the sea alone, using only the patterns of waves and clouds to structure the whole canvas” (exh. cat., op. cit., 1994, p. 76). In his analysis of Marine à Berneval he notes that “some sense of spatial recession is suggested by the shallow diagonals of the breaking waves, leading up from lower left, and by the less emphatic brushwork as the eye moves into the space. But the dramatic, vivid effect of the picture derives from the extraordinary variety of this brushwork, which evokes the deep swell of the sea and the breaking waves with great immediacy. It is a prime example of Renoir’s mastery of a highly informal and seemingly improvisatory method of painting, which could translate natural effects into paint…” (ibid., p. 76).
Colin Bailey states that “both in terms of handling and composition, the small group of seascapes made in Normandy between 1879 and 1882 rank among Renoir’s most audacious and experimental Impressionist landscapes” (Renoir Landscapes, 1865-1883, exh. cat., The National Gallery, London, 2007, p. 199). Bailey relates that in Renoir’s depictions of the wave, he “literally recreates in paint the bursts of foam that issue from the waves as they crash…More than anything else, The Wave conveys the sensation of sheer visual and emotional splendor inspired by the sight of the ocean…” (ibid., p. 200).
Renoir spent the summer months between 1879-1880 at the country château of one of his most important patrons and life-long friend, Paul-Antoine Bérard, in Wargemont on the Normandy coast. His visits to the small towns and villages along the Channel coastline and the landscape paintings he produced were a welcomed respite from the commissioned portraiture he was obliged to paint for rich Parisians in order to earn a living. His enthusiasm for the expansive horizons and the vastness of the sea, sky and coastline is apparent in the present painting from 1879, Marine à Berneval. Here we see the artist delighting in the freedom he is afforded in depicting the writhing and crashing waves and the wildness of nature—contained only by the swath of blue sky and wispy clouds overhead.
The idea of painting the force of a single wave was a theme that had been depicted earlier by such artists as James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Claude Monet and Victor Hugo. In fact, Gustave Courbet, who generally focused his depictions of the sea on a single wave, wrote to Victor Hugo in 1864 expounding on the diverse personalities of the ocean: "The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of a laughing tiger; in its sad moods it recalls the crocodile's tears and, in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up" (P. Ten-Doesschate Chu, Letters of Gustave Courbet, Chicago, 1992, p. 249, no. 64-18).
John House explained that it was in Wargemont where Renoir was able to focus his paintings for the first time on landscapes untouched by modernity and urbanization: “In some of his paintings there, he showed the rolling terrain of the Normandy cliff tops…but in others he focused on the sea alone, using only the patterns of waves and clouds to structure the whole canvas” (exh. cat., op. cit., 1994, p. 76). In his analysis of Marine à Berneval he notes that “some sense of spatial recession is suggested by the shallow diagonals of the breaking waves, leading up from lower left, and by the less emphatic brushwork as the eye moves into the space. But the dramatic, vivid effect of the picture derives from the extraordinary variety of this brushwork, which evokes the deep swell of the sea and the breaking waves with great immediacy. It is a prime example of Renoir’s mastery of a highly informal and seemingly improvisatory method of painting, which could translate natural effects into paint…” (ibid., p. 76).
Colin Bailey states that “both in terms of handling and composition, the small group of seascapes made in Normandy between 1879 and 1882 rank among Renoir’s most audacious and experimental Impressionist landscapes” (Renoir Landscapes, 1865-1883, exh. cat., The National Gallery, London, 2007, p. 199). Bailey relates that in Renoir’s depictions of the wave, he “literally recreates in paint the bursts of foam that issue from the waves as they crash…More than anything else, The Wave conveys the sensation of sheer visual and emotional splendor inspired by the sight of the ocean…” (ibid., p. 200).