Alongside Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir was one of the first painters of the new Impressionist movement that became established in Paris in the mid-1870s. From the beginning on, landscapes occupied a key position in the artistic endeavors of the loose group, which usually congregated in changing constellations for exhibitions. Accompanying the bourgeoisie in their leisure activities and away from academic conventions, the painters went out into nature, often into the countryside around Paris. Walks in parks, on the banks of the rivers and in the forests surrounding Paris, picnics and boat trips became characteristic motifs. Often painted right in front of the subject and plein-air, light reflections, atmospheric moods, and the dazzling prismatic disintegration of the sun's rays became the central pictorial content. Renoir in particular allowed himself great coloristic freedom in his depictions of landscapes, in which he embedded the figures. Interspersed with light blue, yellow, and rosy color accentuation, the female figure, adorned with the flowered hat that is so typical of Renoir, blends in with the vivid landscape. The southern light of his last residence Villa Les Collettes in Cagnes-sur-mer near Nice breaks through in the bright range of his palette. Such smaller-sized subjects as this one, painted in the last year of his life, underscore the immense importance of his late creative phase. Plagued by rheumatoid arthritis, Renoir had repeatedly gone to the South of France around the turn of the century, deciding to move into Villa Les Collettes, where he also had a small studio cottage in the adjacent park, where he, sitting under a parasol directly in front of the subject, created several of his most beautiful paintings. After his death, some of these last paintings remained at that studio while his artistic estate was split up between his three sons. The reverse side of the present painting provides testimony to its provenance history: it came into the possession of his second son, the future film director Jean Renoir, who was awarded the Oscar for his lifetime achievement in 1975. Sold through the prestigious Parisian Impressionist gallery Barbazanges, the painting subsequently became part of the collection of Paul Guillaume, art dealer and important collector, who provided the basic inventory for today's Musée de l'Orangerie. It had its last stop in Paris at the important modernist Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. [KT]