Paysage du Sud de la France

Renoir's southern French landscapes of 1888 belong to the final phase of his Ingresque experiment, when the controlled discipline of his formal rethinking was beginning to relax into the freer synthesis of his mature late manner. He traveled frequently in the late 1880s — to Provence, to the Italian Riviera, to the countryside around Aix-en-Provence where Cézanne was working — both for painting and for the warmth that his increasingly arthritic joints required. Paysage du Sud de la France at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich shows the specific chromatic and atmospheric character of the Mediterranean south: the deeper, drier blues, the warmer yellows and ochres of limestone under intense sunlight, the silver-greens of drought-resistant southern vegetation quite different from the lush variety of northern French greenery. Cézanne had been painting this landscape from the 1860s onward, and the formal challenge of rendering Mont Sainte-Victoire and the rocky garrigues of Provence had shaped his distinctive approach to colour as structure. Renoir's response to the same landscape was warmer and less architectonically rigorous, but the southern light tested his chromatic range in ways that his northern subjects rarely demanded.

The southern French landscape shows Renoir responding to the specific chromatic intensity of Mediterranean light — richer and more saturated than the diffused light of the Paris region. Even within his Ingresque period's more controlled handling, the southern palette demands brighter, warmer colors: the specific blues of Provençal sky, the ochres and terracottas of limestone landscape, the silver-green of olive and almond. His brushwork remains more controlled than his pure Impressionist period but is liberated somewhat by the vivid subject.