Rocky Crags at L'Estaque

In January 1882 Renoir was travelling home from a long trip to Italy when he stopped at L'Estaque, a fishing village just outside Marseille. His friend Paul Cézanne had been painting there on and off since the 1860s, and painted this same site several times. The two meant to work side by side. Within weeks, though, Renoir was in bed at the Hôtel des Bains with pneumonia, and Cézanne looked after him. Renoir wrote to the collector Victor Chocquet that Cézanne had wanted to bring him his whole house, and he praised the salt-cod brandade made by Cézanne's mother as the ambrosia of the gods. In this picture the limestone is built up in firm, blocky planes, closer to Cézanne's way with rock than to Renoir's usual feathery touch, while the deep blue sky is his own. His doctors told him to stay in the warm south, and from L'Estaque he went on to Algeria.