Renoir in Grasse
- Tom Richardson
- Jul 3
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 30
Many visitors to the Côte d’Azur will know of the house in Cagnes sur Mer, the Domaine des Collettes, which was owned by the great impressionist Auguste Renoir and which is now the Renoir museum. Before he bought it in 1907, he had since 1898 spent some or all of the winter months in this area. In 1900 and 1901 he was in Magagnosc, which is part of the commune of Grasse. Wherever he lived, he painted, leaving a legacy of over 4,000 works, including more than 400 landscapes. You can see one of them below.
Whereas the south’s attraction for his impressionist contemporaries such as Claude Monet was primarily the light, Renoir came for a more basic reason: his health. He was different from the other impressionists because he came from a working class background*. His grandfather was a foundling (Renoir’s surname was invented) and the son of one of his patrons said that he "spoke like a working class labourer with a rasping guttural Parisian accent". At thirteen years old, he was sent out to work as an apprentice painter of porcelain crockery. Until his late forties he was often financially dependent upon the generosity of friends and richer fellow-artists.
He achieved relatively sudden success in the late 1880s, but this coincided with the onset of rheumatoid arthritis. His symptoms became worse during cold Parisian winters.
Fortunately, largely because of demand for his work in the USA, where his principal dealer opened a New York gallery displaying the art of the impressionists, his finances improved radically from around 1888.
As a result Renoir, who in 1886 had been reduced to moving his studio in Paris to cut his rent costs, was able by 1898 to become, like rich Parisians and foreigners, a ‘hivernant’ (‘winterer’) in the south. He stayed in Cagnes in that year and in 1899, but in 1900 he spent January until mid-May in Magagnosc.
One assumes that he preferred to avoid the society parties and events of somewhere like Grasse’s Grand Hotel! According to local research (thanks to Laetitia from Grasse’s Service Ville d'Art et d'Histoire), he selected the Pension Hugues Ross, which lay on a section of the road from Magagnosc to Grasse now known as av Auguste Renoir.
In a letter in 1900, Renoir describes his choice as a "large, clean and sunlit house, three kilometres from Grasse and one from Magagnosc”.
I assume it is the house in the centre of the photograph, with the faded advertising mural. I can’t find any building matching it today, but it seems to fit quite well with Renoir’s description. It would have faced almost fully south into the winter sun on the downward slope from the road. In a reminiscence, Ambroise Vollard, a younger friend who was also one of his dealers, describes Magagnosc as “a Provençal village…strangely perched on the mountainside. At that time, Renoir was still able to walk fairly well, and I remember the walks we took together in the mountains.”
Renoir returned to Magagnosc, one assumes to the same establishment, in November 1900 and stayed until April of the following year.
A letter from him to a friend in January 1901 reads "the hare with the head on was admired by the whole of Magagnosc, and I'm going to enjoy it. I'm delighted that the parcel of grapes has pleased you...." He goes on to say that his health is mediocre, "despite the extraordinarily fine weather. But here we are at the end of January, and the days are getting longer, so maybe I'll be able to recover at last…”
While in Magagnosc and despite his health, he conceived his fourth child (at the age of 60) with his wife and sometime model, Aline. He already had two sons from his marriage, one of them the future eminent film director Jean Renoir.
His first child, Jeanne, had been born illegitimately in 1870 with his model and first love, Lise Tréhot. Renoir kept her existence a secret from Aline. When he wanted to send Jeanne some money in February 1901, he sent it to her husband from the post office not in Magagnosc but in Châteauneuf next door, saying “Please respond directly to M. Renoir, General Delivery, Châteauneuf de Grasse…”
Today, when Magagnosc blends virtually seamlessly into Châteauneuf, that sounds almost farcical, but in 1901 the two small village centres were quite separate and the 2km distance between them must have been enough to make Renoir feel safe.
Another painting from around this time is entitled named ‘La Ferme de Magagnosc’, but has the alternative title of ‘La Villa Raynaud, Grasse’. The location is uncertain, perhaps somewhere in the Riou Blanquet quarter, but Claude Raynaud and his family owned a perfume business in the old town. It seems plausible that they also owned premises in the country nearby and that Renoir, who stayed in various places between 1902 and 1907, was a visitor. When Christie’s sold it in 2023, they dated it to 1903. Certainly it is one of his most attractive landscapes.
From 1901 onwards, Renoir’s sojourns in the south became longer and longer: the Cote d’Azur gave him both better weather and relief from marital strains. Until her abrupt dismissal in 1913, his usual companion was his maid, distant relation and current model, Gabrielle Renard, rather than Aline, who much preferred their house in her home town of Essoyes, near Troyes.
Renoir had been reluctant to live anywhere but Paris until his debilitating illness struck, but he committed himself to the south when he bought the Domaine des Collettes in 1907. He spent the rest of his life there and in an apartment in Nice, dying in 1919, having survived his health problems to reach the age of 79.
*I have used 'Renoir: An Intimate Biography' by Barbara Ehrlich White, published in 2017, as my main source for the dates and letter excerpts in this post. The author, an American academic specialising in Renoir, based her book on 3,000 letters by, to and about him.