Brief Report

Renoir’s painting Landscape on the Banks of the Seine at Rueil remained in the possession of the artist’s family for a long time and is one of the few pictures he painted on wood [Dauberville 2007, cat. no. 143]. The picture support is not a standard size, but rather somewhere between F12 Marine (38.o x 60.0 cm) and F15 Marine (46.0 x 65.0 cm). Recto the marks left by planing the surface of the panel can be discerned under raking light (fig. 3). Almost in the middle of the top edge there is a thornlike prick in the panel, which presumably results from a fastening either during manufacture or during the painting process (fig. 6). The indisputable finding that the panel is poplar wood is surprising; as in other works in the Wallraf collection, here too we have a drastic darkening of the wood (cf. for example Georges Seurat, Street Scene, 1883, WRM Dep. 822, Paul Signac, St. Tropez, Calm, 1895, WRM Dep. FC 683, Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec, Fishing Boat, 1885, WRM Dep. FC 719). This darkening is particularly evident where the panel has been left unpainted to reveal what is now the dark reddish brown of the unprimed wood; it now recalls a tropical hardwood such as mahogany rather than the originally pale poplar (fig. 8). The visible painting was evidently executed without any further planning. Only in the bottom right-hand corner can one discern with the help of IR reflectography a few lines of a pencil drawing, which does not however belong to the picture (Abb. 7). Before Renoir filled out the areas of the picture with predominantly short brushstrokes of varying orientation, he partially covered the surface in both halves of the picture with opaque paints: yellow for the flower-meadow and white in the sky (fig. 9). These applications of paint were largely dry before the remaining work proceeded wet-in-wet (figs. 11, 12). As already in other works by Renoir, a pure black was also used here (fig. 13) [cf. Renoir, Villeneuve-les- Avignon, WRM Dep. FC 791, and Burnstock/Van den Berg/ House 2005, p. 54]. The likewise wet-inwet signature evinces clear damage and retouching (fig. 5). As part of a far-reaching structural restoration measure, the original picture-support was cradled, while previously on both sides of the picture the panel was thinned and partially reinforced using liriodendron (tulip-tree) wood (figs 2, 6).

Auguste Renoir
On the Banks of the Seine near Rueil, 1879, oil on poplar, 38.2 x 66.0 cm, WRM Dep. FC 790

Auguste Renoir

born on 25 February 1841 in Limoges,
died on 3 December 1919 in Cagnes

Brief report with complete data as downloadable pdf-file

Further illustrations:

Fig. 02

Verso, cradled


Fig. 03

Raking light (light source at top)


Fig. 04

UV fluorescence


Fig. 05

Detail, signature in incident light, applied wet-in-wet, as IR reflectogram (top left) and photographed under the microscope (M = 1 mm, top right); losses in the inscription have been meticulously retouched (arrows)


Fig. 06

Details, panel: traces of a fastening (top), treatment by cradling and lateral addition to the panel (bottom, arrows)


Fig. 07

Detail of the bottom right-hand corner: IR reflectogram reveals
locally present pencil drawing unrelated to the picture


Fig. 08

Detail, wood of the panel visible in places left unpainted (arrows)


Fig. 09

Partially applied coloured underlay in white (left) and yellow (right), microscopic photographs (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 10

Detail, wet-in-wet paint applications of varying consistency


Fig. 11

Wet-in-wet paint applications, applied both vertically and
horizontally, microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)


Fig. 12

Detail, dashed, heavily condensed paint applications in the
region of the meadow


Fig. 13

Detail, Renoir sometimes used black paint, which most other
Impressionists had largely banished from their palette, to be
seen here in the righthand figure, top right microscopic photograph (M = 1 mm)