Environs of Berneval

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FROM THE BARNES FOUNDATION’S CATALOG

This painting represents the rolling countryside behind the cliffs at Pourville, a small seaside resort town in northern France. Renoir depicted this little hamlet in several canvases from 1879. As in many of his landscapes of the 1870s, Renoir chose a very unconventional viewpoint. The viewer is seemingly located deep among the foreground bushes, which frame the right margin but also run across the entire foreground, denying us any clear foothold in the space depicted.

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