Landscape. Le Cannet

Le Cannet, above Cannes on the French Riviera, was a place Renoir knew from his early winter visits to the south and that his friend Pierre Bonnard would later make his definitive home and primary subject. Landscape at Le Cannet at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg was painted in 1902, six years before Renoir moved permanently to nearby Cagnes-sur-Mer. The painting belongs to the group of Mediterranean landscapes he produced on his early winter excursions — Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire country to the east, the Côte d'Azur to the south, the olive-grove hillsides of the Alpes-Maritimes — that demonstrated the chromatic richness of southern French subjects. The Hermitage's extraordinary collection of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, acquired largely through Shchukin and Morozov and now housed in the museum that Peter the Great founded, allows this southern landscape to be read within the comprehensive context of French painting from Poussin through to the early modernists.

The southern landscape's intense colour requires Renoir to work with a palette pushed to fuller saturation than his northern canvases. His brushwork at this period is more deliberately structured than in his purely Impressionist phase, building the hillside's terraced vegetation in parallel strokes that give the surface a woven, tapestry-like quality.