In Renoir’s later years, initially as a response to his poor health and arthritis, he and his family spent an ever increasing amount of time through summer and winter on the French Riviera. First they stayed at Le Cannet and later Cagnes, where in 1907 Renoir purchased Les Collettes, an old farm situated among olive and orange groves. The intense southern sun, rich colours and mountainous landscape provided him with endless inspiration and helped inject his art with a new vitality.

‘La Cueillette des fruits’ is a remarkable example of Renoir's characteristically warm and immediate suggestion of light and shadow. His increasingly abstracted depictions of his subjects during this period, partly as a result of his failing eyesight, coupled with exquisite and dextrous variations of colour in the present work result in this beautiful examination of atmosphere. Renoir sought to immortalise the passing moments which occur in nature, such as a gust of wind or the fall of sunlight through trees, and the delicate feathery brushstrokes on display in the present work are the means by which he was so effectively able to commit these experiences to the canvas.

In response to an exhibition of Renoir’s later work at Durand-Ruel, J.F. Schnerb commented on the artist’s late oeuvre, ‘M. Renoir more and more loves his canvas being full and sonorous. He loathes empty spaces. Every corner in his landscapes offers a relationship of colours and values chosen with a view of embellishment of the surface. His recent studies of the Provençal landscape have led him to transpose the themes furnished by nature into the most sonorous colour range and to assemble the largest possible number of elements in the canvas, like a musician who ceaselessly adds new elements to the orchestra’ (quoted in J. House, Renoir, New York, 1985, pp. 276-77).

The present work closely relates to ‘The Vineyards at Cagnes (Les Vignes à Cagnes)’, 1908, at the Brooklyn Museum.