Landscape at Beaulieu

Beaulieu-sur-Mer, on the Côte d'Azur east of Nice, was one of the Mediterranean locations Renoir visited repeatedly from the late 1880s onward as he sought winter warmth for his increasingly arthritic body. His Beaulieu landscapes, painted in brilliant Mediterranean light, were part of the broader shift in his palette toward warmer, more saturated colour that characterised his work after his so-called Dry Period. The Mediterranean landscape — its intense blue sky, orange soil, and dark-green vegetation — demanded a chromatic response very different from his earlier Normandy or Île-de-France work.

The warm, high-key palette of Renoir's Mediterranean paintings is fully evident here: orange-red earth, deep blue sky, and the silvery-green of Mediterranean vegetation are juxtaposed with the saturated directness of southern light. The brushwork is looser than his contemporary figure paintings, the landscape serving as a colour study rather than a worked-up composition.