The Vineyards at Cagnes (Les Vignes à Cagnes)

Here, Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts a woman reading beneath an olive tree on his estate near Cagnes, in the South of France. The property offered panoramic views of the countryside, and he made many such landscapes there, capturing radiant light, lush vegetation, and moments of quiet leisure in colorful, feathery brushstrokes. Although his freely handled technique is quintessentially modern, his composition—foreground trees framing the receding landscape and distant mountain—recalls the orderly compositional structure of seventeenth-century landscapes, with trees framing a distant vista.