Landscape at Essoyes

The village of Essoyes in the Aube department of Champagne occupies a special place in Renoir's biography: his wife Aline Charigot was born there, and Renoir returned to it repeatedly from the late 1880s, purchasing a house in 1896 and using it as his summer base until Aline's death in 1915. Landscape at Essoyes of 1903 belongs to the sustained engagement with this personal landscape that produced some of his quietest and most genuinely observed late work. The Champagne countryside around Essoyes — its gentle hills, its vineyards (Essoyes is wine country, close to the Côte des Bar), its streams and orchards — differs fundamentally from both the Île-de-France he had painted in his Impressionist years and the saturated Mediterranean landscapes of his southern journeys. The light is softer, the palette more muted, the associations more intimate: this is his wife's native landscape, and his repeated return to it reflects a personal relationship with place that his more public painting practice rarely reveals. The Essoyes landscapes represent the domestic side of a painter whose public image was shaped by his more ambitious figure subjects.

The Essoyes landscape is characterised by gently undulating agricultural land, and Renoir's handling captures the particular quality of northern French rural light — warmer and softer than the bleached Mediterranean light, allowing for a richer green palette modulated through complex overlapping of warm and cool colour areas.