Paintings I love
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
L’Estaque
oil on canvas, 66 x 81 cm.
Painted in 1882
Private collection
By 1882, Renoir had reached the zenith of his Impressionist style. He had been taken under the wing of the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and had won high profile patrons at home in Paris, most notably Marguerite Charpentier who hosted a famous Salon at which Renoir, as well as Manet and Sisley, was an habitué. The early 1880s were also marked by a flurry of international travel for Renoir as he visited Algeria and then Italy.
It was on his return from Italy, in January 1882, that Renoir stopped to stay with Paul Cézanne at l’Estaque, close to Marseilles in the South of France. Despite his recent commercial success, Renoir, at the age of forty, was still plagued by the same sort of self-doubt that tortured Cézanne throughout his life. However, Renoir found inspiration in the Mediterranean landscape. Writing to Marguerite Charpentier, to explain an extension to his stay with Cézanne, Renoir enthused: ‘I am in the process of learning a lot, and the longer I take, the better it will be…I have perpetual sunshine and I can scrape off and begin again as much as I like. This is the only way to learn’.
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