Seated Woman with Sea in the Distance (Femme assise au bord de la mer)

Seated Woman with Sea in the Distance of 1917, painted in Renoir's penultimate active year, places a costumed female figure against the distinctive blue Mediterranean visible from the heights of Cagnes-sur-Mer, combining his late figure and landscape interests within a single composition. The sea as background for figure painting had a long tradition in French art — from the fashionable bathing subjects of the Normandy coast through the plein-air figure studies of the Impressionists — but Renoir's late Cagnes versions used the sea not as social context but as pure chromatic counterpoint: the cool Mediterranean blue against the warm tones of the figure creating a temperature contrast that activated both elements. In 1917 he was seventy-six years old and working from a wheelchair, yet his late figure paintings retain the freshness and chromatic intelligence of his best work. The seated woman format was particularly suited to his physical limitations: a seated figure could be posed at eye level and painted without the physical demands of larger standing figure canvases.

The figure in the foreground is painted with Renoir's late warm flesh modelling, while the sea in the distance provides a cool blue-grey contrast that makes the figure advance through colour temperature opposition. The sky and coastal landscape are handled loosely with atmospheric washes of warm blue and ochre.