Houses in a Park (Maisons dans un parc)

Houses in a Park belongs to Renoir's late Cagnes landscape production, a group of canvases exploring the interplay of Provençal architecture with the abundant vegetation of the Mediterranean garden. Renoir had purchased Les Collettes in 1907 specifically to preserve an old olive grove from destruction, and the estate's combination of ancient trees, stone walls, and sunlit terraces became a sustained landscape subject. The inclusion of architecture within landscape — white walls, terracotta roofs — gave his otherwise fluid landscape handling something firm and light-reflecting to organize around. Cézanne, working nearby at Aix-en-Provence during the same period, had made architecture-in-landscape central to his late structural investigations, and though Renoir's approach was temperamentally opposed — warmer, more atmospheric, less analytical — both painters were responding to the same specific quality of Provençal light and stone. The Barnes Foundation's holding of several such late park and garden landscapes documents Renoir's sustained interest in this particular compositional type during the years 1908 to 1914, when his arthritis increasingly confined him to subjects close to home.

The white or pale stone of the park buildings provides a strongly lit architectural element against which the greens and blue-greens of the surrounding vegetation contrast vigorously. Renoir builds the foliage with overlapping strokes of varied greens while the architecture is handled with broader, firmer passages.