When Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted Esquisse de paysage à Cagnes in 1915, he was living in the small Provençal town of Cagnes-sur-Mer, confined to a wheelchair by severe rheumatoid arthritis. Despite his physical limitations, Renoir continued to paint with brushes strapped to his hands, transforming the landscape around his home into a final, radiant chapter of his long career. This sketch belongs to a remarkable period when Renoir, in his seventies, turned away from grand Parisian scenes and instead captured the sunlit hills and olive groves of southern France.

The exact medium of this work is uncertain, but its loose, spontaneous handling suggests oil or pastel applied with the urgency and freedom of a late experimenter. The painting seizes a fleeting impression: a hillside dotted with trees, the Mediterranean light dissolving edges and bathing the scene in warmth. Renoir’s brushwork is quick and broken, allowing patches of bare support to peek through, as if the landscape itself is unfinished, still coming into being. The eye is drawn to the interplay of greens and ochres, the suggestion of a path, and the way the sky melts into the land.

Unlike the precise, architectural landscapes of Paul Cézanne, who also painted in the south of France, Renoir’s approach here is softer, more atmospheric, prioritizing sensation over structure. The absence of figures is notable—here, nature alone is the subject, animated by the artist’s lingering joy in color and light. Esquisse de paysage à Cagnes was likely painted for Renoir’s own pleasure or for a close circle of friends and collectors, as many of his late landscapes were. While the precise provenance of this sketch is not fully documented, works from this period often remained in the artist’s studio until his death in 1919, after which they entered private and public collections across Europe and America.

Today, this work stands as a testament to Renoir’s resilience and his lifelong devotion to painting, even as his body failed him. It is a window into the last years of an Impressionist pioneer, still chasing the effects of sunlight and atmosphere in the hills of Cagnes.