Outskirts of Maintenon

By 1888 Renoir was uneasy about Impressionism. For several years he had been drawing more tightly and cooling his colour, in what he later called his 'sour' manner, worked out after studying Ingres and the Italian frescoes. This landscape on the edge of Maintenon, a small town southwest of Paris in the Eure-et-Loir, catches him loosening that grip again and going back out into the countryside. Maintenon is dominated by its château and by the tall stone arches of an aqueduct that Louis XIV began in the 1680s to carry water to the fountains of Versailles and abandoned, unfinished, a decade later. Renoir kept the pure landscape rare in his work. The human figure almost always came first. That same year the first attacks of rheumatism reached him, the illness that would slowly stiffen the hands that made pictures like this one.