In 1910, as Pierre-Auguste Renoir struggled with the pain and stiffness of advancing rheumatoid arthritis, he painted Pines near Cagnes during his final years in the South of France. What makes this work remarkable is that, despite his illness, Renoir refused to give up painting—he famously had brushes strapped to his hands so he could continue working. This painting stands as a testament to his resilience and his unyielding devotion to his craft, even as his body betrayed him. The canvas captures a sunlit grove of pine trees near Cagnes-sur-Mer, where Renoir had settled at his estate, Les Collettes.

The scene is alive with dappled light, the trunks and branches rendered in loose, swirling strokes that seem to shimmer in the Mediterranean air. The foreground is thick with undergrowth, and the trees appear almost to sway, their forms blurring at the edges in a haze of greens and ochres. Unlike the precise realism of earlier landscape painters, Renoir here dissolves detail in favor of atmosphere and sensation—a technique that sets his late landscapes apart from those of Claude Monet, whose own trees at Giverny are more structured and architectural. Pines near Cagnes belongs to the last phase of Renoir’s career, when he turned increasingly to the landscape around his home for inspiration.

The exact medium of this work is not always listed in museum catalogues, but it is typical of the oil paintings he produced at Les Collettes. After Renoir’s death in 1919, many of his late landscapes entered private collections; some were sold by his family, while others made their way into public institutions. Today, Pines near Cagnes is celebrated as an example of the artist’s enduring vision—a painting created in defiance of physical limitation, and a window onto the luminous countryside that sustained him in his final years.