Chestnut in Blossom

Renoir painted this blossoming chestnut in 1881, a year when his life was opening up. The dealer Paul Durand-Ruel had begun buying his canvases again, and with that income Renoir travelled, to Algeria in the spring and to Italy in the autumn. What he saw there, Raphael in Rome and the wall paintings from Pompeii in Naples, soon pushed him towards firmer outlines and a stricter kind of drawing. This picture comes from just before that turn. The tree rises from a low wall almost like a plant in a pot, and only at a second glance do you notice the river on the right, with a sandy path running beside it. Reds and violets, greens and blues are woven together in small touches, so nothing in the scene has much weight. On his way home from Italy early in 1882, Renoir stopped in the south of France and painted for a while alongside Paul Cézanne.