Girl Seated in a Landscape (Jeune fille assise dans un jardin)

Girl Seated in a Landscape, 1914, is one of Renoir's final figure paintings, produced when he was seventy-three years old and working from a wheelchair at Les Collettes with brushes bound to wrists that could no longer grip. In 1914 Matisse and Bonnard were both nearby, and Matisse visited him at Cagnes that year, noting in his letters that Turner — whom both of them admired — had predicted through his late atmospheric painting the direction that twentieth-century painting would take. Renoir's late garden figure, by contrast, represented a conscious refusal of that direction: a simple, warm figure in southern light, unchanged in essential approach from his work of the 1870s and 1880s. The extraordinary achievement of his final decade was the maintenance of his painterly voice — its warmth, its colour intelligence, its sensuousness — under conditions of extreme physical difficulty. This 1914 canvas, painted in the same year the Great War began, represents Renoir's quiet insistence on the values of beauty and pleasure in the face of a world consuming itself.

The late Renoir brushwork of 1914 is broadly applied with characteristic feathery looseness, building the figure through warm colour zones rather than precise drawing. The garden setting is a shimmer of greens and yellows applied freely around the more deliberately modelled figure.