View of the Seacoast near Wargemont in Normandy

Normandy: Renoir spent a significant part of the late summer in 1879 and 1880 with his patron Paul Berard and Berard’s family at their château at Wargemont in Normandy. The estate lies in farming country east of Dieppe and inland, but at no great distance from the Manche (English Channel). When the artist was not painting portraits of family members (The Met 61.101.15) or flowers and fruit (The Met 56.218, 61.101.12), from time to time he turned his attention to the surrounding landscape. Here, farm buildings lie in a sheltered cleft above the steep cliffs that characterize long stretches of the wind-swept coast. The trees are in leaf, and the fields have turned yellow. Far out on the unruffled water, which fades from blue to turquoise in the shallows, there are small boats with red sails. Through a V-shaped indentation in the rock to the right, a wave, heavily impasted in white, tumbles toward the (invisible) shore. The small canvas would have been portable, and it is likely that Renoir began work on it in the fields before the motif—seeking to capture the light of the moment—and, in a temporary studio or in Paris, finished it later. While passages of sea and sky are transparent, others are thick with patterns of varicolored hatchings.

The Painting: The views Renoir painted while at Wargemont were for his own pleasure or intended for the art market. None belonged to Berard (who, however, did own a view of Venice by Renoir). The artist retained this one, which was not exhibited in his lifetime, nor published until 1967. There are related signed and dated works from the previous summer (1879), including Road at Wargemont (Toledo Museum of Art, 1957.33), in which a road winds down a steep slope and slanting beams of light fall over a field and distant woods. The larger Toledo canvas, seemingly left as it was sketched outdoors, displays small dark blobs and blurred skeins of pale tone that read like watercolor. In terms of finish, Wheatfields (Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection on loan to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, CTB 1961.11), also of 1879, lies between the Toledo picture and The Met’s: blurring in the distance is combined with layering and hatch marks in the field in the foreground. All three landscapes are without figures. Only someone who had lived nearby would have recognized the precise location of any of them. Ours, a more conventional composition and more highly finished, differs in suggesting the windy conditions that prevail near the coast. A pattern of diagonal strokes in the sky contributes to the effect.

Katharine Baetjer 2021

Inscription: Signed and dated (lower right): Renoir .80.

[Durand-Ruel, Paris, 1890–95, stock no. 788; bought from the artist on December 3; sold on January 7 to Durand-Ruel]; [Durand-Ruel, New York, 1895–1906, stock no. 1316; sold on February 9 to Emmons]; Arthur B. Emmons, New York and Newport (1906–d. 1922); Mrs. Arthur B. Emmons (Julia W.) New York and Newport (1922–d. 1956)

Nashville. Fisk University. "100 Years of European Painting," April 28–June 10, 1965, unnum. checklist (as "Landscape").

New York. Wildenstein. "Renoir: In Commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of Renoir's Death," March 27–May 3, 1969, no. 34.

Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art. "Landscape Painting in the East and West," April 19–June 1, 1986, no. 15.

Kobe City Museum. "Landscape Painting in the East and West," June 7–July 13, 1986, no. 15.

Brisbane. Queensland Art Gallery. "Renoir, Master Impressionist," July 30–September 11, 1994, no. 17 (as "View of the Coast near Wargemont").

Melbourne. National Gallery of Victoria. "Renoir, Master Impressionist," September 18–October 30, 1994, no. 17.

Sydney. Art Gallery of New South Wales. "Renoir, Master Impressionist," November 5, 1994–January 15, 1995, no. 17.

Kunsthalle Tübingen. "Renoir," January 20–May 27, 1996, no. 57.

London. National Gallery. "Renoir Landscapes: 1865–1883," February 21–May 20, 2007, no. 52 (as "View of the Coast Near Wargemont").

Charles Sterling and Margaretta M. Salinger. French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 3, XIX–XX Centuries. New York, 1967, p. 153, ill., note that it was formerly called "Landscape, Guernsey"; comment that it was undoubtedly painted during Renoir's second visit to the diplomat Paul Bérard at Wargemont, near Berneval, on the Channel coast; characterize the painting as an example of Renoir's impressionistic style of the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Renoir: In Commemoration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of Renoir's Death. Exh. cat., Wildenstein & Co., Inc. New York, 1969, unpaginated, no. 34, ill.

Charles S. Moffett. Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1985, p. 165, ill. (color), affirms that Renoir painted it out-of-doors, "working quickly and broadly to capture the landscape's salient features before the lighting conditions changed"; comments that as in many classic Impressionist works by Renoir and Monet, the surface is quite rough.

John House. Renoir, Master Impressionist. Exh. cat., Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Sydney, 1994, pp. 21, 84–85, no. 17, ill. (color), calls it "View of the Coast near Wargemont"; contrasts its technique with some of Renoir's other Wargemont paintings of the previous year.

Katharine Baetjer. European Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art by Artists Born Before 1865: A Summary Catalogue. New York, 1995, p. 482, ill.

Götz Adriani. Renoir. Exh. cat., Kunsthalle Tübingen. Cologne, 1996, pp. 41, 198–99, no. 57, ill. (color).

Richard Shone. The Janice H. Levin Collection of French Art. Exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 2002, fig. 25.

Colin B. Bailey in Renoir Landscapes: 1865–1883. Exh. cat., National Gallery. London, 2007, p. 198 n. 4, pp. 204, 215, identifies the same site from a different angle in Renoir's "The Mussel Harvest" of 1879 (National Gallery of Art, Washington).

John Zarobell in Renoir Landscapes: 1865–1883. Exh. cat., National Gallery. London, 2007, pp. 218–19, no. 52, ill. (color), asserts that it was begun outdoors but completed in the studio, noting the contrast between the thick areas of pigment and the lighter treatment of sea and sky.

Guy-Patrice Dauberville, and Michel Dauberville, with Camille Fremontier-Murphy. Renoir: Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles. Vol. 1, 1858–1881. Paris, 2007, p. 213, no. 155, ill.

John House in Renoir in the Barnes Foundation. New Haven, 2012, p. 95, fig. 2 (color), states that the landscapes Renoir painted at Wargemont in 1879 and 1880 "mark the beginning of his move away from the explicitly contemporary scenarios of the environs of Paris to the seemingly more timeless, unchanging scenes that he favored in his later work" and notes the "unconventional viewpoint".