Collection of the artist
Corinne Ehrlich, New York 
Galerie Jean-Claude Bellier, Paris 
Galerie de la Présidence, Paris 
Private Collection (acquired from the above)
Louis Stern Galleries, Los Angeles
Corinne Timsit, San Juan
Acquired from the above in 1989

Worthing, West Sussex, Worthing Art Gallery, Impressionism to Surrealism, 1970, no. 3

Bernheim-Jeune, ed., L'Atelier de Renoir, vol. I, Paris, 1931, no. 329, illustrated pl. 101
Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville, Renoir, Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, vol. IV, Paris, 2012, no. 2961, illustrated p. 170 & in color p. 171

Canvas is lined. Edges are reinforced with tape. Impasto is well preserved. The canvas is slightly bowed at center. Under UV light a few pindots of inpainting are visible near upper left and right corners. Otherwise fine. This work is in very good condition.
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In the early 1880s Renoir made his first forays abroad; he had previously traveled no further from Paris than Normandy. The years of 1881-84 however saw Renoir in a variety of disparate locations including Algeria, Italy and the French Riviera. It was on these journeys that he stepped away from rendering purely figure-based compositions, rather creating an interesting series of landscapes to record his new surroundings. There is no doubt that these travels deeply affected Renoir and his art, and indeed he would return repeatedly to the South of France, eventually choosing to settle permanently in Cagnes-sur-Mer in the early 1900s.

Port de Marseille, Le Fort Saint-Jean exemplifies Renoir’s canvases from these sojourns to the Mediterranean coast. Here he depicts the Old Port of Marseille, which was originally settled in 600 B.C. by the Greeks. By the mid-1800s over 12,000 ships passed through the port per year, making it a principal trade route well into the twentieth century. The swift strokes in this canvas lend a sense of movement to the ships and passersby, while the predominantly lighter tones emphasise the brightness and heat of the Mediterranean sun. It has been written: "It was in landscape painting…that Renoir achieved some of his most startling Impressionist effects and his most arresting coloristic discoveries. So completely is form dissolved in some of his paintings that Renoir comes closer to pictorial abstraction than any other artist of his time. Landscape was also an area in which he felt a particular freedom to improvise with touch and application of paint, moving from a surface of thick impasto on one canvas to a watercolor-like application of thinned-down oil pain on another" (Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883 (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery, London; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa & Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2007-08, p. 7).