Environs of Berneval

Environs of Berneval by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painted in 1879 and now at the Barnes Foundation, depicts the countryside around the small Norman coastal village of Berneval near Dieppe, where Renoir spent time painting during a period when the Normandy landscape was attracting multiple Impressionist painters. Berneval provided Renoir with a combination of coastal scenery, Norman village atmosphere, and the particular quality of northern coastal light that differed markedly from the Ile-de-France landscapes that dominated his earlier plein-air work. The Barnes Foundation's holding of this work places it within one of the world's great concentrations of Renoir's paintings.

The Normande landscape setting brings cooler, grayer tones into Renoir's palette compared to his work in the Seine valley, and the Berneval paintings show him responding to this different light with adjustments to his color base. The handling of vegetation in the Norman countryside — denser, more varied in green than the Seine valley — required a more complex chromatic approach than his meadow and riverbank compositions. The sky's treatment is particularly attentive to the variable cloud conditions of the Channel coast.