Landscape on the Coast, near Menton

In December 1883 Renoir and Claude Monet took a short trip together down the Mediterranean coast, from Marseille to Genoa, travelling more as tourists than as working painters. It was Renoir's first sight of the Riviera. He wrote to his patron Paul Bérard that the country was beautiful and that, alas, their poor palette could not match up to it. He painted it anyway, a grove of trees bent by the wind on a bluff above the sea near Menton, close to the Italian border, all bright colour and feathery strokes, and signed it at the lower right, Renoir. 83. A few weeks later Monet went back to the same coast on his own. He asked their dealer Durand-Ruel to tell no one, Renoir above all, explaining that touring together had been a pleasure but working together would be awkward. One of the pictures from that second trip, Monet's Cap Martin, near Menton, belongs to the same museum in Boston.