Houses on a Hill (Groupe de maisons sur un coteau)

Houses on a Hill of 1908 belongs to an important transitional moment in Renoir's landscape practice: the year after he purchased Les Collettes at Cagnes-sur-Mer and began settling permanently into the Provençal landscape that would dominate his final decade. The subject — stone houses grouped on a hillside — combined his interest in architectural form within landscape with the specific character of Provençal settlement: white and ochre walls in brilliant southern light, terracotta roofs, shuttered windows. In 1908 he was sixty-seven years old and his arthritis was already severe, but landscape subjects offered a degree of physical accessibility — he could work from his wheelchair or in his specially equipped open-air studio at Les Collettes — that made them increasingly important to his late production. Cézanne had died in 1906, and the Provençal landscape subjects Renoir was beginning to explore in 1908 inevitably entered a space that Cézanne had made his own; yet Renoir's approach — warmer, more atmospheric, less structurally analytical — was sufficiently distinct to constitute its own statement about what the southern French landscape could mean to a painter.

The hillside composition stacks architectural and vegetative elements without strong spatial recession, creating an almost tapestry-like arrangement of warm ochres and greens. Renoir treats the stone buildings with broadly applied warm strokes, integrating them with the hillside vegetation through shared tonal warmth.