A pencil description on the reverse of this painting identifies it as a landscape near Annecy, a medieval town adjacent to a large lake in the Haute-Savoie region of France. The exact location has not been identified, however, and the scenery depicted in the view bears little resemblance to the lake itself, which is several miles long, half a mile wide at even its narrowest point and surrounded on both sides by the Alpine foothills. Renoir has either adapted what he saw to suit his own purposes or found an unusual viewpoint (the area around Talloires on the north shore has been suggested) – or perhaps this is a smaller lake, somewhere in the hills outside the town.
Whichever is the case, there is a sense of secrecy about the view he has chosen. We glimpse the lake through a gap in the thick vegetation around its banks, but slightly masked by a thin veil of high grasses. It is a view that creates a deep perspective and that hides as much as it reveals. There are no people to be seen and – apparently – no buildings, just the contrast between the trees and bushes surrounding the water and what seems to be sparser growth on the slopes of the higher ground in the distance.
As was usual in his landscapes, Renoir has used strong colour combinations, offsetting the bright greens with contrasting shades of red (pinks, ochre and rusts) to increase the vibrancy and intensity of the pigments. Here he also seems to be mirroring the optical effects we experience when we look into the distance. Things that are close to us or in our peripheral vision – in this case, those grasses and the foliage on either side of the foreground – go out of focus as our eyes see beyond them. So instead of painting what is closer to the viewer in more detail, Renoir has used broad dabs of the brush to create an impression of blurring, tricking the eye into looking deeper into the picture.
He was also experimenting with other effects produced by different brushwork. To evoke the reflections on the still surface of the lake, he has used mostly smooth, horizontal strokes, whereas the sky has been described with longer streaks of blue, pink, grey and white paint which are broadly vertical but slant down slightly from right to left. For the hills in the distance he has worked his brush to create a mix of angles in the thick paint.
Aspects of Renoir’s style in this painting are reminiscent of techniques used by his friend, Paul Cezanne. In particular, Cezanne’s influence is apparent in the short, intense brushwork describing the trees and foliage in the right background. It isn’t unusual to find Renoir working in this way – seeing what he can learn from his contemporaries.
The painting is undated and there are no records confirming when Renoir visited Annecy, but it is close in style to the artist’s landscapes of the second half of the 1880s. The apparent influence of Cezanne suggests that it may have been made after Renoir had stayed with his friend in Aix en Provence. He made two visits there, one in 1888 and the other in 1889.
