Le Cannet

Le Cannet, 1902, depicts the hillside village near Cannes where Renoir was living temporarily as he explored the French Riviera before settling permanently at Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1907-08. Le Cannet — a village of Provençal terraced houses, terracotta rooftops, and Mediterranean garden vegetation climbing the hillside above Cannes — provided him with a distinctly southern townscape quite different from the Norman and Parisian environments he had painted for the first three decades of his career. The village would become famous decades later as the home of Pierre Bonnard, who painted it obsessively from 1926 until his death in 1947; Renoir's earlier Cannet canvases precede Bonnard's treatment and establish the visual vocabulary — warm stone, blue sky, Mediterranean green — that both painters found in this specific Riviera village. The Barnes Foundation's acquisition of this and other Riviera townscape views reflects Barnes's understanding that Renoir's southern landscapes were as important as his figure paintings to understanding his late development.

The warm Provençal light saturates the canvas with ochre and orange tones in the village architecture, contrasted against the deep blue of the sky and the blue-green of Mediterranean vegetation. Renoir applies paint broadly with his late loose manner, achieving atmospheric warmth through chromatic saturation rather than precision.