Environs of Briey (Environs de Briey)

Environs of Briey, 1899, is a landscape from the industrial Meurthe-et-Moselle region of northeastern France, an unusual subject for Renoir whose landscapes typically favour the picturesque rather than the industrialised. The Briey region was part of France's iron and steel country, and this canvas may have been painted while visiting acquaintances in the area rather than as a deliberate artistic choice of an industrial subject. The Barnes Foundation holds it as documentation of his broad geographic range. By 1899 Renoir's arthritis was making extended travel more difficult, and his landscape excursions were becoming less frequent.

The rural outskirts landscape is handled with Renoir's standard late landscape vocabulary—overlapping green passages, warm ochre earth tones, variable sky. Without the Mediterranean brilliance of his Provençal subjects, the tonality is somewhat cooler and greyer, consistent with a northern French overcast palette.