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Lot Essay
In January of 1882, Pierre-Auguste Renoir travelled to L’Estaque, a small fishing village in the South of France, and installed himself at the Hôtel des Bains. Renoir had spent the previous several months working in Algeria and Italy, and was in the middle of his return journey to Paris when he found himself captivated by luminosity of the landscape in this corner of France. ‘How beautiful it is!’ he wrote. ‘It’s certainly the most beautiful place in the world, and not yet inhabited… There are only some fishermen and the mountains… so there are no walls, no properties or few… here I have the true countryside at my doorstep’ (quoted in Renoir, exh. cat., Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, p. 233).
So enthralled was Renoir by the crystalline light that he wrote to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, of his plans to paint while in L’Estaque: ‘It would be a real shame to leave this lovely countryside without bringing something back’ (quoted in C. Bailey and C. Riopelle, eds., Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883, exh. cat., National Gallery, London, 2007, p. 252). Almost as an afterthought, he added, ‘I ran into Cezanne and we are going to work together,’ despite the fact that the two were old friends (ibid.). Cezanne was living in L’Estaque at the time, and the two artists worked side-by-side to capture the rocky grandeur of the Provençal landscape. During this stay, Renoir painted two similar views of the region’s craggy, rugged cliffs – Rochers à l’Estaque (Dauberville vol. 2, no. 774; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and the present work, Rochers de L’Estaque. Here, the rocks are captured beneath a powdery blue sky, sunlight imbuing the creamy surface of the stones with a rich luminosity. The sun’s rays catch the foliage of the shrubs and trees that dot the hillside, glinting off leaves and trunks, and conveying a sense of the soft, wintery light. According to Christopher Riopelle, the present motif corresponds to the upper left of the Boston picture, offering a close-up, more focused view of the natural monument.
During this period, Cezanne was honing his mature style, specifically the use of his so-called ‘constructive’ brushstroke, which consisted of short, parallel lines organised diagonally. Renoir greatly admired Cezanne’s developing technique, and its influence can be detected in Rochers de L’Estaque – the sky, along with several passages in the foreground, are composed of clear, linear strokes, carefully arranged alongside one another to lend the composition a new sense of dynamism. But while Cezanne was working towards a unifying geometry, Renoir concentrated on capturing the immediacy of the scene in front of him, working quickly to depict his initial, fleeting impressions. As he later reflected, ‘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).
Rochers de L’Estaque is an exultation of plein air painting – as well as Renoir’s own veneration of the natural world. His awe at nature’s grandeur, and his desire to capture this emotion in paint, reveals his admiration for the landscape tradition. Renoir’s practice was informed by the Barbizon School, who set up their easels outside, but he also drew from Rubens, Titian, and Raphael. Following the time in L’Estaque, Renoir wrote to Madame Marguerite-Louise Charpentier, his patron, ‘I shall, I believe, have acquired the simplicity and grandeur of the ancient painters’ (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2007, p. 253). Yet Renoir’s skill resided in his capacity to reimagine canonical traditions, and works such as Rochers de L’Estaque pay homage to what came before, while also offering a new understanding of composition and sensation.
Rochers de L’Estaque was formerly in the collection of Catholina Lambert. Born in Yorkshire, Lambert immigrated to the United States in 1851 where he began working at a silk factory, before eventually becoming a partner in the enterprise. Lambert assembled an extraordinary collection of art that included works by Botticelli, Bronzino, Peter Paul Rubens, Tintoretto, Titian, and Eugène Delacroix, as well as dozens of paintings by Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, and Renoir, including the celebrated Au bord de la mer (Femme assise) (Dauberville vol. 2, no. 1063; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Lambert displayed his paintings at his home, Belle-Vista, in Paterson, New Jersey, and the significance and scale of the collection was described in a 1900 publication of The Collector and the Art Critic: ‘To give a catalogue with all the titles and systematically arranged as they hang here on the walls would be to make a museum description…’ (‘Collection of Mr. Catholina Lambert (Belle-Vista, Paterson, N. J.)’ in The Collector and the Art Critic, 1900, p. 104). Many of Mr. Lambert’s paintings are now in museum collections including The Frick Collection, New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Museum Barberini, Potsdam, among others.
So enthralled was Renoir by the crystalline light that he wrote to his dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, of his plans to paint while in L’Estaque: ‘It would be a real shame to leave this lovely countryside without bringing something back’ (quoted in C. Bailey and C. Riopelle, eds., Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883, exh. cat., National Gallery, London, 2007, p. 252). Almost as an afterthought, he added, ‘I ran into Cezanne and we are going to work together,’ despite the fact that the two were old friends (ibid.). Cezanne was living in L’Estaque at the time, and the two artists worked side-by-side to capture the rocky grandeur of the Provençal landscape. During this stay, Renoir painted two similar views of the region’s craggy, rugged cliffs – Rochers à l’Estaque (Dauberville vol. 2, no. 774; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and the present work, Rochers de L’Estaque. Here, the rocks are captured beneath a powdery blue sky, sunlight imbuing the creamy surface of the stones with a rich luminosity. The sun’s rays catch the foliage of the shrubs and trees that dot the hillside, glinting off leaves and trunks, and conveying a sense of the soft, wintery light. According to Christopher Riopelle, the present motif corresponds to the upper left of the Boston picture, offering a close-up, more focused view of the natural monument.
During this period, Cezanne was honing his mature style, specifically the use of his so-called ‘constructive’ brushstroke, which consisted of short, parallel lines organised diagonally. Renoir greatly admired Cezanne’s developing technique, and its influence can be detected in Rochers de L’Estaque – the sky, along with several passages in the foreground, are composed of clear, linear strokes, carefully arranged alongside one another to lend the composition a new sense of dynamism. But while Cezanne was working towards a unifying geometry, Renoir concentrated on capturing the immediacy of the scene in front of him, working quickly to depict his initial, fleeting impressions. As he later reflected, ‘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).
Rochers de L’Estaque is an exultation of plein air painting – as well as Renoir’s own veneration of the natural world. His awe at nature’s grandeur, and his desire to capture this emotion in paint, reveals his admiration for the landscape tradition. Renoir’s practice was informed by the Barbizon School, who set up their easels outside, but he also drew from Rubens, Titian, and Raphael. Following the time in L’Estaque, Renoir wrote to Madame Marguerite-Louise Charpentier, his patron, ‘I shall, I believe, have acquired the simplicity and grandeur of the ancient painters’ (quoted in exh. cat., op. cit., 2007, p. 253). Yet Renoir’s skill resided in his capacity to reimagine canonical traditions, and works such as Rochers de L’Estaque pay homage to what came before, while also offering a new understanding of composition and sensation.
Rochers de L’Estaque was formerly in the collection of Catholina Lambert. Born in Yorkshire, Lambert immigrated to the United States in 1851 where he began working at a silk factory, before eventually becoming a partner in the enterprise. Lambert assembled an extraordinary collection of art that included works by Botticelli, Bronzino, Peter Paul Rubens, Tintoretto, Titian, and Eugène Delacroix, as well as dozens of paintings by Gustave Courbet, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Camille Pissarro, and Renoir, including the celebrated Au bord de la mer (Femme assise) (Dauberville vol. 2, no. 1063; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Lambert displayed his paintings at his home, Belle-Vista, in Paterson, New Jersey, and the significance and scale of the collection was described in a 1900 publication of The Collector and the Art Critic: ‘To give a catalogue with all the titles and systematically arranged as they hang here on the walls would be to make a museum description…’ (‘Collection of Mr. Catholina Lambert (Belle-Vista, Paterson, N. J.)’ in The Collector and the Art Critic, 1900, p. 104). Many of Mr. Lambert’s paintings are now in museum collections including The Frick Collection, New York, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Museum Barberini, Potsdam, among others.