Buste de femme nue (fragment)

The vibrant sketch presented here belongs to the final years of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s illustrious career. Painted in 1916, Esquisse de laveuses, paysage brings together two central themes of his late œuvre: the washerwomen, a humble subject to which he had returned over several decades, and the luxuriant landscapes of the South of France that came increasingly to occupy him in his later years.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Renoir was firmly established as one of the leading figures of Impressionism, exhibiting and selling internationally and receiving the Légion d’honneur in 1900. Advised by his doctor to seek a warmer climate, he moved soon afterwards to Cagnes-sur-Mer, eventually settling at Les Collettes amid the olive groves of the Provençal countryside. There, landscape assumed renewed importance in his work. The abundant vegetation and shifting Mediterranean light encouraged the increasingly fluid, expressive handling that came to distinguish his late manner, a development quickly remarked upon by contemporary critics. In a review of a Durand-Ruel exhibition, J.F. Schnerb referred to Renoir’s late landscapes as follows: ‘M. Renoir more and more loves his canvas being full and sonorous… Every corner in his landscapes offers a relationship of colours and values chosen with a view of 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 the orchestra’. (quoted in J. House, Renoir, New York, 1985, pp. 276-77).

Esquisse de laveuses, paysage vividly embodies this sense of a canvas at once ‘full and sonorous.’ Renoir constructs the scene through broad, sweeping strokes, carrying colour freely across the surface. At the centre of the composition, two women bend towards the water’s edge, their bodies summoned with rapid touches of white, rose and blue. Rather than standing apart from their surroundings, the figures seem almost absorbed into the landscape, their forms articulated through the same fluid handling that describes the trees and foliage around them. Dense vegetation flickers with yellow, green and orange, while the red and ochre roof of distant house punctuate the surrounding greenery. As contours dissolve, the vibration of light and movement comes to govern the canvas.

The stream is central to this effect. Rapid strokes of blue wind through the composition, carrying cooler tones into the women’s dresses, their reflections and the shadows along the bank. In this respect, the work recalls Le Béal, now in the Barnes Collection, one of Renoir’s defining depictions of the South of France, in which a similarly narrow course of water threads through dense Provençal vegetation. Yet the composition also looks further back across Renoir’s career. The bending figures beside the stream, together with the glimpse of architecture beyond, recall his earlier treatments of washerwomen, including the Washerwomen of 1888. The motif itself was longstanding; what distinguishes the present work is its transformation through the language of Renoir’s late landscape painting. The women no longer simply inhabit the countryside but are swept into its rhythm, as water, foliage and architecture coalesce through the same movement of the brush. A familiar subject is thus recast through the freedom of Renoir’s late manner, becoming inseparable from the colour, light and movement of the Cagnes landscape.

It was in these years, too, that the legendary photographs of Renoir painting fervently from his wheelchair were taken, revealing the passion and determination with which he continued, defiantly, to create ground-breaking pictures. Esquisse de laveuses, paysage itself bears this enduring vitality.

The history of the present painting is almost as eventful as the century through which it travelled. At the outbreak of the Second World War, its owner, the Hungarian-Jewish collector and art dealer Alfred Weinberger, fled Paris, having deposited several paintings, including the present Renoir, with Morgan & Co. Bank for safekeeping. The work was nevertheless seized by the Nazi authorities, inventoried by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), and deposited at the Jeu de Paume in December 1941 before being transferred to Germany on the orders of Hermann Göring. Long thought lost, the painting resurfaced on the art market several decades later and was acquired in good faith by a private collector in the 1980s. Now restituted to the Weinberger heirs, this compelling Renoir carries with it a provenance inseparably bound to the turbulent history of twentieth-century Europe.