Ed. Bernheim-Jeune, L'Atelier de Renoir, Paris, 1931💧, vol. 2, no. 379, illustrated pl. 122 (fragment of a larger canvas)

The turn of the century marked not only a shift in Renoir's personal life, but also in his painting. The material success of the 1890's afforded him increasing freedom, allowing him and his family to retreat from Paris to the Mediterranean coast where he painted the current work. John House wrote that, "The immediate reason for these changes was Renoir's health, undermined by the onset of arthritis, but they reflected a more general change in his art, towards the Classicism of the Mediterranean and, more particularly, towards ideas then associated with the revival of Provencal culture" (Anne Distel, Renoir, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, NewYork, 1985, p. 268). For the remaining period of his life, Renoir concentrated on combining the tenets of Impressionism with those of more classical forms of art. House continues, "Physically, too, the south offered him a site where he could fuse observed reality with a framework of tradition...These traditions from the past allowed him to find what he had been unable to find among his artist contemporaries in Paris; an unquestioning belief in human beauty, based on the celebration of the splendours of the visible beauty rather than on the archeological reconstructions favoured by academic art schools" (ibid., pp.16-17)

In La veuse dans un paysage, a woman kneels at the bank of a stream in the provincial south of France while washing her clothes. Aware of the narrative limits of portraiture, Renoir found inspiration in the natural serenity of the Mediterranean coast which allowed him to depict relationships through landscapes and figures. Renoir described his approach to focusing on the atmosphere of a place: “My landscape is only an accessory; at the moment I’m trying to fuse it with my figures” (ibid., p. 289). The figure dissolves into the feathery brushstrokes of the foliage and is drawn into an active relationship with her environment. The warm colors suffuse the grasses and trees as well as the woman. She is not deliberately posing for the work as Renoir often sought to depict the figure naturally without a sense of awareness of the artist's gaze. This unified yet animated vision of landscape complements the vision of woman within nature whic☂h emerged in the outdoor figure paintings of his last years.