Paintings I love
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
Le pêcheur à la ligne
oil on canvas, 54.1 x 65.2 cm.
Painted in 1874
Private collection
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An emerald-toned mirage of soft color and shimmering light, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Le pêcheur à la ligne was painted in 1874, a momentous year that witnessed the birth of Impressionism. Likely painted in the summer of this seminal year, while Renoir was working with his friend Claude Monet at his home in Argenteuil, this painting shows the artist working en plein air, using swift, spontaneous brushstrokes to capture an immersive impression of this idyllic corner of the landscape, evoking the soft light, hazy warmth and gentle reverie of this summers’ day.
Picturing a well-dressed couple enjoying the rural French countryside, here Renoir achieves a masterful synthesis of figure and landscape, bathing both of these components in a vaporous light and conveying them in a palette of harmonious, fresh color. One of a small series of works of this time, all of which present couples within the secluded landscape, Le pêcheur à la ligne sees Renoir conceive a new kind of genre of painting, transforming the classical subject of the pastoral idyll into modern times and portraying it with a radical new pictorial language. Exhibited in public shortly after its completion at the inaugural Impressionist auction, held at Hôtel Drouot in March 1875, this painting was the very first Renoir acquired by the publisher, Georges Charpentier, who would become the artist’s greatest patron and lifelong friend.
The summer of 1874 was a crucial moment in the history of Impressionism. A few months earlier, Renoir, along with Monet, Degas, Pissarro and Morisot, as well as a number of other artists, had exhibited together for the first time in what would become known as the First Impressionist Exhibition. Held in the former studios of the experimental photographer Nadar, the landmark exhibition included a range of work in various media and was the very first time that a group of artists had joined together to exhibit their work independently from the state-sanctioned Salon system.
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