The Vineyards of Cagnes 1908

Pierre-Auguste Renoir made this painting, "The Vineyards of Cagnes" with oil on canvas. The whole scene vibrates with marks, flicks, and dashes of paint. The colour palette leans heavily on earth tones, but look closely and you will find lilacs, pinks, and blues, all intertwined to create a sense of light filtering through the leaves. The application of paint seems almost casual, yet it's deliberate, like a mosaic, each stroke carefully placed to build up the image. Notice the way he's rendered the figure sitting in the lower right, how the red of her blouse pops against the greens and browns of the landscape, drawing your eye into the scene. There is a tension between abstraction and representation that is similar to the work of the later painter Bonnard, in the way that he almost dissolves the forms into their surrounding. The vineyards of Cagnes embraces the ongoing conversation about what a painting can be, suggesting the possibility of multiple interpretations.