Landscape. Le Cannet

Landscape at Le Cannet (1902), at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, depicts the hillside village above Cannes where Renoir spent time, and which his friend Pierre Bonnard would later make his own. Le Cannet's steep streets, luxuriant gardens, and views down to the Mediterranean made it a reliable source of motifs for both artists. By 1902 Renoir was living much of the year in the south, where the warmth eased his rheumatoid arthritis, and his Mediterranean landscapes from this period share a saturated warmth — deep greens, terracotta reds, ultramarine skies — that reflects both observed reality and personal visual preference.

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.