On the Painters’ Trail in Provence

Mike Gerrard Shakes Hands with History on the Painters’ Trail in Provence.

It was like looking through Renoir’s eyes. At La Ferme de Collette – the Farm on the Little Hill – are olive trees that were planted in 1538. The trees were one of the reasons Pierre-August Renoir bought the house in Cagnes-sur-Mer near Nice, where he was to spend the last twelve years of his life and which is now preserved as a museum. He wanted to save the trees from threatened destruction, and he did, in two ways. He bought the house and he painted the trees, that are as twisted as his hands were to become by the end of his life in 1919.

I’m standing outside his house looking at these trees, and looking at Renoir’s painting of them at the same time. It’s on a plaque beneath the branches and is part of an enterprising new project in this part of Provence: La Côte d’Azur des Peintres. In places including Cagnes-sur-Mer, St-Paul-de-Vence, Grasse, Villefranche and Antibes are plaques holding reproductions of works by many famous artists, including Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Chagall, Dufy, Cocteau and Bonnard. The plaques cradle the paintings as the artists’ original easels would have done, as they have been put up as close as possible to the spots in which the artists stood to paint the views.

We’ve been traveling around trying to track down the plaques, which isn’t easy because one thing the Painters’ Route lacked when it was launched was a map marking where the plaques can be found. We have promenaded along boulevards and boulevarded along promenades, we have popped into shops and into tourist information offices, where we occasionally had more information than the baffled information officers themselves.

In Antibes we trail from one end of the seafront to the other till we find Delacroix’s painting of the Fortress and Raymond Peynet’s charming Lovers by the Ramparts. In Villefranche-sur-Mer we climb up into the back streets and stumble upon the atmospheric cellar-like Rue Obscure which, apart from the lack of a naked woman lying in front of it, is exactly as it was when Jean Cocteau painted it in the mid-1950s.

In Grasse as well as the fragrant Fragonard perfume factory we also sniff out Raoul Dufy’s View of Grasse from 1930 and Edwin Sutter’s Rue de la Fontette, a steeply-angled street in the old part of town, lined by tall and colourful buildings. Did Sutter shift one of the houses? Did Dufy move that tree just a little? The pleasure in the Painters’ Route is not always in recognising the scene and seeing how much or how little it has changed, but also in seeing the artist’s vision of it. There are Impressionists, Expressionists and Surrealists. There are the pastel colours of Monet, and the dazzling palette of Marc Chagall in St-Paul-de-Vence… and there are the gentle eyes of Renoir.

Back at Renoir’s ‘little farm’, we’re not only looking at Renoir’s olive trees and his painting of them, but under the trees there are artists at their easels, painting the view just as Renoir himself did. It’s part of an annual competition for local artists organised by the Renoir Museum. Outside Renoir’s house is a copy of his 1914 painting, Landscape at Les Collettes, showing that the landscape is pretty much the same as today’s artists are seeing. But here you can walk a few yards to go inside the house and see Renoir’s original on the wall. Look through the window and there’s the view.

‘Every window is a canvas,’ says Jean-Marc Nicolaï, our guide for the afternoon from the local tourist office. When Jean-Marc hears we’ve been following the Painters’ Route he spreads his arms in that French expression of delight, as he is one of the people behind the whole scheme. He tracked down paintings that were done in and around Cagnes-sur-Mer, and then had to work out where they were painted. ‘Very enjoyable!’ he says.

In Renoir’s studio are his chair and easel, just as he left them. His wheelchair is there too, and nearby the stretcher on which he would be carried outside so he could continue painting. He was still painting on the day before he died, at the age of 78.

Jean-Marc then drives us up to the high old part of town, Haut-de-Cagnes, firstly to show us round but he has also discovered my interest in the French game of pétanque. He’s a keen player himself, and takes a set of boules from the boot of his car and we enjoy a game in the late afternoon sunshine. ‘Pétanque is the soul of the French village,’ Jean-Marc says, as he beats me soundly.

We walk back down the cobbled streets of Haut-de-Cagnes and I see what seems to be a familiar figure walking towards us carrying some boules, though I can’t quite place him.

‘Ah,’ says Jean-Marc, ‘here’s a friend of mine. He is a very good pétanque player. May I introduce you to Jacques Renoir?’

We all shake hands in the polite French manner, and after Jacques has said goodbye and wandered towards the pétanque pitch, I ask Jean-Marc: ‘Did you say his name was Renoir.

‘Oh yes,’ says Jean-Marc casually, as if it wasn’t half as interesting as his prowess at pétanque, ‘he is Renoir’s great-grandson.’ Now I knew why he had seemed so familiar. It was like looking, not through, but right into Renoir’s eyes,