.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In the late summer of 1879, Pierre-Auguste Renoir visited the country home of his patron and friend, Paul Bérard, the Château de Wargemont, near the port town of Dieppe in northern France. Renoir became fascinated by the idyllic natural landscape surrounding Wargemont—the windswept fields, overgrown gardens, dramatic cliffs and aquamarine water along the Normandy coast. The present work, representing a village near Wargemont, is among the most luminous, colorful scenes that Renoir painted there.
La route à Wargemont depicts a group of women and children ambling down a winding path, bordered by quaint seaside cottages. Renoir observed these charming figures from an unexpected angle: he situated them in the distant background, while the stony road occupies the majority of the foreground. The promenaders are further dwarfed by the copious green foliage that surrounds them. The left side of the composition is almost entirely dominated by a lush garden—a profusion of red, pink and white flowers that are barely contained by a thick hedge. These colorful blooms, indicated with thick daubs of pigment, prefigure the staccato gardens of later Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pictures.
In addition to its unconventional perspective, La route à Wargemont is distinguished by its rich, jewel-toned color palette. The artist’s fluid painting technique—a dense flurry of brushstrokes—also lends the painting a sense of dreamy imprecision. This apparently rapid, spontaneous execution was typical of Renoir’s Impressionist style in the late 1870s. During this period, Renoir painted largely en plein air; he worked quickly to capture his initial impressions of color and light. While the final details of the painting might be added later in the artist’s studio. Renoir much preferred to observe atmospheric effects outdoors. As he later noted, “In the open air, one feels encouraged to put on the canvas tones that one couldn’t imagine in the subdued light of the studio” (quoted in M. Lucy and J. House, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation, New Haven, 2012, p. 217).
Beyond the figures strolling along La route à Wargemont, Renoir provided a glimpse of the blue-green water of the English Channel; above, he painted a broad swath of pale blue sky, dimpled with fluffy white clouds. Here, Renoir evokes the fresh sea air and rural quiet that attracted bourgeois Parisians, like Bérard, to the Normandy coast. Indeed, the idle summer afternoon depicted here forms a sharp contrast with the noisy chaos of modern urban life, the subject of several early paintings by Renoir. The present work was painted during Renoir’s first trip Bérard’s home, from July to September 1879—the late summer months in which the heat and smell of Paris is particularly oppressive. Renoir must have been drawn to the refreshing breeze and picturesque charm of the coastal region and would return to paint several more outdoor scenes, including a panoramic seascape, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Dauberville, no. 155).
Bérard, a Protestant banker and diplomat, probably met Renoir at the Salon of 1878. He quickly became one of the artist’s most significant patrons, introducing Renoir to his wealthy social network and inviting him to stay and paint at Wargemont. Bérard’s estate, which included an elegant eighteenth-century château and a cultivated rose garden, was described by the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt as “a pretty place, an English park, rather isolated” (quoted in C. Bailey, Renoir Portraits: Impressions of an Age, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997, p. 38). There, in addition to the surrounding landscape, Bérard’s family also proved to be a source inspiration; Renoir devoted several canvases to Bérard’s wife, Marguerite Girod, and their four children: André, Lucie, Marthe and Marguerite. In 1884, Renoir captured the domesticity of the Bérard household at Wargemont in a large-scale portrait, now at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Dauberville, no. 965). Bérard’s children, with whom Renoir developed a great rapport, may also be represented in La route à Wargemont.
While Renoir is best known as a figurative painter, he continued to paint the landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes of France throughout his career. Renoir’s devotion to the genre formed the subject of a 2007 exhibition, Renoir Landscapes: 1865-1883, at the National Galleries of London and Ottawa, as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Renoir began to study landscape in the 1860s, inspired by the work of the Barbizon school of painters, as well as his contemporaries, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley. By the 1870s, Renoir had developed his own distinct visual language to communicate the ephemeral effects of sunlight and shadow, as well as the dynamic movements of water and sky. Renoir’s earliest formal experiments— his use of bold, unblended color and increasingly abstract brushwork—often unfolded in the context of landscape painting. For the art historian John House, the landscapes that Renoir painted at Wargemont in 1879 and 1880 represent a significant shift in the artist’s oeuvre, because they “mark the beginning of his move away from the explicitly contemporary scenarios of the environs of Paris to the seemingly more timeless, unchanging scenes that he favored in his later work” (M. Lucy and J. House, op. cit., New Haven, 2012, p. 95). Indeed, Renoir’s bucolic vision of land and sea found early expression in the canvases he painted at Wargemont.
La route à Wargemont depicts a group of women and children ambling down a winding path, bordered by quaint seaside cottages. Renoir observed these charming figures from an unexpected angle: he situated them in the distant background, while the stony road occupies the majority of the foreground. The promenaders are further dwarfed by the copious green foliage that surrounds them. The left side of the composition is almost entirely dominated by a lush garden—a profusion of red, pink and white flowers that are barely contained by a thick hedge. These colorful blooms, indicated with thick daubs of pigment, prefigure the staccato gardens of later Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pictures.
In addition to its unconventional perspective, La route à Wargemont is distinguished by its rich, jewel-toned color palette. The artist’s fluid painting technique—a dense flurry of brushstrokes—also lends the painting a sense of dreamy imprecision. This apparently rapid, spontaneous execution was typical of Renoir’s Impressionist style in the late 1870s. During this period, Renoir painted largely en plein air; he worked quickly to capture his initial impressions of color and light. While the final details of the painting might be added later in the artist’s studio. Renoir much preferred to observe atmospheric effects outdoors. As he later noted, “In the open air, one feels encouraged to put on the canvas tones that one couldn’t imagine in the subdued light of the studio” (quoted in M. Lucy and J. House, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation, New Haven, 2012, p. 217).
Beyond the figures strolling along La route à Wargemont, Renoir provided a glimpse of the blue-green water of the English Channel; above, he painted a broad swath of pale blue sky, dimpled with fluffy white clouds. Here, Renoir evokes the fresh sea air and rural quiet that attracted bourgeois Parisians, like Bérard, to the Normandy coast. Indeed, the idle summer afternoon depicted here forms a sharp contrast with the noisy chaos of modern urban life, the subject of several early paintings by Renoir. The present work was painted during Renoir’s first trip Bérard’s home, from July to September 1879—the late summer months in which the heat and smell of Paris is particularly oppressive. Renoir must have been drawn to the refreshing breeze and picturesque charm of the coastal region and would return to paint several more outdoor scenes, including a panoramic seascape, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Dauberville, no. 155).
Bérard, a Protestant banker and diplomat, probably met Renoir at the Salon of 1878. He quickly became one of the artist’s most significant patrons, introducing Renoir to his wealthy social network and inviting him to stay and paint at Wargemont. Bérard’s estate, which included an elegant eighteenth-century château and a cultivated rose garden, was described by the American Impressionist Mary Cassatt as “a pretty place, an English park, rather isolated” (quoted in C. Bailey, Renoir Portraits: Impressions of an Age, exh. cat., National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997, p. 38). There, in addition to the surrounding landscape, Bérard’s family also proved to be a source inspiration; Renoir devoted several canvases to Bérard’s wife, Marguerite Girod, and their four children: André, Lucie, Marthe and Marguerite. In 1884, Renoir captured the domesticity of the Bérard household at Wargemont in a large-scale portrait, now at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Dauberville, no. 965). Bérard’s children, with whom Renoir developed a great rapport, may also be represented in La route à Wargemont.
While Renoir is best known as a figurative painter, he continued to paint the landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes of France throughout his career. Renoir’s devotion to the genre formed the subject of a 2007 exhibition, Renoir Landscapes: 1865-1883, at the National Galleries of London and Ottawa, as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Renoir began to study landscape in the 1860s, inspired by the work of the Barbizon school of painters, as well as his contemporaries, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley. By the 1870s, Renoir had developed his own distinct visual language to communicate the ephemeral effects of sunlight and shadow, as well as the dynamic movements of water and sky. Renoir’s earliest formal experiments— his use of bold, unblended color and increasingly abstract brushwork—often unfolded in the context of landscape painting. For the art historian John House, the landscapes that Renoir painted at Wargemont in 1879 and 1880 represent a significant shift in the artist’s oeuvre, because they “mark the beginning of his move away from the explicitly contemporary scenarios of the environs of Paris to the seemingly more timeless, unchanging scenes that he favored in his later work” (M. Lucy and J. House, op. cit., New Haven, 2012, p. 95). Indeed, Renoir’s bucolic vision of land and sea found early expression in the canvases he painted at Wargemont.