Thatched Cottages in Berneval

Renoir spent part of 1897 on the Normandy coast near Dieppe, and at the little seaside village of Berneval he painted this small view of thatched cottages among trees. By then he was in his mid-fifties and his hands were beginning to stiffen with the arthritis that would eventually cripple them, yet his touch here stays soft and quick, the roofs and foliage built from loose, feathery dabs of paint. It is a modest, sunlit thing, the kind of landscape he turned out easily on a summer trip. Its later history was stranger. Lost in the upheavals of the Second World War, the painting was returned by Germany to France in 1994 and placed on deposit in the castle-museum at Dieppe, a few miles from where he set up his easel.