Pierre-Auguste Renoir

French painter

• Born: February 25, 1841
• Birthplace: Limoges, France
• Died: December 3, 1919
• Place of death: Cagnes-sur-Mer, France

One of the greatest of the French Impressionists, Renoir painted in the open air, handling the paint loosely, dissolving masses, and abandoning local colors. He differed, however, from most other Impressionists in his concentration on the human figure and in his strong interest in portraiture.

Early Life

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (reh-nwahr) was the son of Léonard Renoir, a poor painter who moved his family from Limoges to Paris in 1845, when Pierre-Auguste was four years old. There the young Renoir, who displayed talent for music as well as for drawing, was enrolled in the choir school of the parish church of Saint-Roch. His elder sister Lisa first exposed him to painting at the age of nine by taking him to the Louvre. He would doodle in his exercise books in school, and he was later encouraged in art by Lisa’s fiancé, the illustrator Charles Leray.

At the age of thirteen, Renoir was apprenticed to the Lévy Frères firm of porcelain painters, for whom he painted decorative bouquets on dishware in an eighteenth century style. During his lunch periods, he hurried to the Louvre, where he practiced his drawing; later, in 1860, he was given official permission to copy there. After losing his job in the porcelain atelier in 1858, when the firm went bankrupt, he painted fans for a living, copying on them pictures of the rococo artists François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Nicolas Lancret, and Antoine Watteau. The sense of joy and gracefulness encapsulated in that phase of French painting would later be found in Renoir’s own work.

Renoir enrolled in 1862 in the academically oriented studio of Charles Gleyre, a mediocre Swiss painter, where he met Jean Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, and Alfred Sisley. At gatherings at the home of a relative of Bazille, he met the painter Édouard Manet, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and the novelist Théophile Gautier. Leaving Gleyre’s studio the next year, Renoir painted with his friends in the Fontainebleau Forest in order to sketch the landscape and move toward greater naturalism. They stayed at Chailly, near the encampment of the Barbizon painters, and Renoir met there the Barbizonist Narcisse Virgile Diaz de La Peña. The major influence on Renoir’s work from 1867 to 1870 was exerted by Gustave Courbet, whose heavy modeling, massive figures, and use of the palette knife can be seen reflected in Renoir’s rendering of the nude in Diane Chassereuse (1867). In that picture there can be discerned, too, the influence of Manet in the use of an obviously contemporary figure to pose for a mythological scene.

Life’s Work

In the spring of 1868, Renoir and Bazille moved to a studio in the rue de la Paix, where Monet would occasionally join them. In the evenings, they often went to the Café Guerbois, where there would be much talk of painting, with Manet as the presiding figure, the painter Paul Cézanne, the printmaker Félix Bracquemond, Henri Fantin-Latour, Constantin Guys, and Sisley, and the novelists Émile Zola and Gautier.

Renoir’s leap into full-blown Impressionism occurred in 1869 with his paintings of La Grenouillière, the bathing place and floating restaurant at Bougival on the Seine. His intention was to combine the sense of poetry of the rococo with a motif from contemporary life. His strokes are broken. About half of the painted surface is given to the shimmering water, and light and atmosphere have become the unifying elements. Renoir and Monet painted side by side at that spot, and their compositions and placement of boats and figures on water-surrounded platforms are almost identical, except that Renoir gives somewhat more prominence to the figures.

During that time, as the supporter of his mistress Camille and her son Claude, Renoir struggled to make ends meet and often borrowed from Bazille. In 1870, he was drafted for the Franco-Prussian War. He believed that it was his duty to serve and was sent first to Bordeaux and later to Tarbes. Back in Paris by March 18, 1871, Renoir continued in the Impressionist manner through the 1870’s.

In his work Renoir gave no indication of the political unrest of the times; his most ambitious paintings of the next years were of streets filled with leisurely strollers and of beautiful young people enjoying their carefree existence in the open air. Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre (1876) shows couples dancing at a popular open-air spot while other people converse and drink at the outdoor tables, a custom on Sunday afternoons. The crowd swirls about, with Renoir focusing on no single person or couple, giving a sense of randomness. Some figures are cut by the edge of the canvas. All seem to be enjoying themselves to the utmost, with no hint of anything troubling. Renoir once said, “The earth as the paradise of the gods, that is what I want to paint.”

In 1874, Renoir took an active part in the organization of the Impressionist group and participated in some of the group’s exhibitions. In spite of his adherence to what was then stylistically avant-garde, he also exhibited more conservative paintings at the salon and was commissioned to do portraits of prominent people. His portrait Madame Charpentier and Her Children (1878) was dignified and can be considered to be related to Impressionism mainly in the casual postures of the sitters. In the Charpentier circle he met Zola once again, as well as the author Alphonse Daudet, the critic Edmond de Goncourt, and the diplomat-banker Paul Bérard, who was to be a steadfast patron. From the mid-1870’s, as Renoir began to obtain portrait commissions and as his pictures began to be collected, his circumstances improved.

In the spring of 1881, Renoir traveled to Algiers and then in the fall to Venice, Rome, and Naples, where he was impressed by the works of Raphael and by Pompeian frescoes. He became disaffected with his Impressionist involvement, convinced that he had lost much of his ability to draw. He said to the dealer Ambrose Vollard, “There is a greater variety of light outdoors than in the studio… because of this, light plays far too important a part, you have no time to work out the composition.”

Throughout the 1880’s, Renoir gave figures a much firmer outline instead of partially dissolving them in light. He made preparatory drawings and grouped figures according to deliberate schemas, sometimes based on a specific monument of the past. The three sculpturesque nudes in Les Grandes Baigneuses (c. 1887) are based on a seventeenth century relief by François Girardon at Versailles. From 1888 on, his nudes became heavier, with broader hips, longer torsos, more-rounded legs, and smaller breasts, as he tried to capture something of the monumentality of the antique. In 1895, becoming interested in the plays of the ancient Greeks, he painted a series dealing with the Oedipus story.

Renoir, who so admired health, robustness, and joie de vivre, in later life had to cope with serious illness. In 1888, he visited Cézanne at Aix; Cézanne cared for him while he was ill. Arthritis combined with rheumatism became his chief affliction. In 1894, he began to walk with two canes. He traveled to various spas in the hope of finding a cure and wintered in the south. In 1913, he was confined to a wheelchair.

After 1892, Renoir had no financial worries, as a large one-man show that year at Durand-Ruel’s proved a turning point. (Monet had introduced him to the dealer in the summer of 1872, and Durand-Ruel had done much during the 1880’s to further the prices of Renoir’s paintings.) Renoir also married rather late in life. His marriage with Aline Charigot in 1882 produced three sons: Pierre was born in 1885, Jean in 1893, and Claude in 1901.

In his children, Renoir found a new subject matter, yet he also continued to paint his radiant nudes, which during the 1890’s were painted outside any environmental context and seemed to glow from within. Toward the end of Renoir’s life, for example, as in the painting Judgment of Paris (1914), the nudes became bulbous and awkwardly heavy, perhaps reflecting the artist’s own hampered mobility. Renoir also became engaged in sculpture from 1907. He was encouraged in this direction when he was visited that year by the sculptor Aristide Maillol, who did a bust of him.

Renoir’s sculptures are improvisations on his late paintings, with massive figures in slow movements. These include the Judgment of Paris (1916) and Blacksmith (Fire) (1916). As he had a disability that left him with little dexterity in his hands, Renoir made drawings for the design, and an assistant, adding and subtracting according to his directions, built up the model in clay. In 1918, Renoir because completely immobilized and had to be carried. Nevertheless, before his death the next year, he made a last visit to the Louvre to see the old masters.

Significance

Although usually considered as one of the inner group of the French Impressionists, Renoir was in important ways atypical. Like the other painters, he portrayed (at first glance) the life of the times, but actually what he presented were young men and women in modern clothes acting as though they were in an arcadia devoid of the stresses of the day. In his evocation of a never-never land, he is as close, in spirit, to the rococo painters of the eighteenth century as he is to the Impressionists.

Unlike other Impressionists, Renoir makes little use of open spaces, sometimes expanding or contracting to convey the tensions of modern life. He did not much explore flattenings, unusual perspectives, or cutting of figures (a device sometimes found in Renoir’s paintings but seldom made much of). Renoir is perhaps best known for his paintings of figures rather than landscapes, unlike the other Impressionists. His paintings of nudes, especially, gained for him recognition, and his later nudes, with the unusual use of pigments providing a glowing, curiously weightless look, have provoked much interest.

Bibliography

Bailey, Colin B. Renoir’s Portraits: Impressions of an Age. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press in Association with National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1997. This book, published to accompany an exhibition, contains an essay examining Renoir’s work as a portraitist, with detailed descriptions of his subjects. Includes reproductions of his portraits.

Barnes, Albert C., and Violette De Mazia. The Art of Renoir. New York: Minton, Balch, 1935. Barnes was a noted and eccentric collector who amassed some two hundred of Renoir’s paintings. Barnes sees Renoir as an artist of the first rank. The text, however, is full of flowery phraseology and vague terminology. Barnes makes comparisons with Cézanne and others in his attempt to fit Renoir into a quasi-abstract mold.

Benjamin, Roger. Renoir and Algeria. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003. Renoir visited Algeria in 1881 and 1882, creating two dozen paintings of Algerian scenes and people. This book, which accompanied an exhibition of Renoir’s Algeria paintings, analyzes the paintings and the influence of Orientalism on other works by the artist. Also includes an essay providing historical and cultural background about Algeria and the French presence there in the nineteenth century.

Renoir, Auguste. Pierre Auguste Renoir. Introduction by Walter Pach. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1950. Includes large, excellent color plates. Discusses Renoir’s handling of his subjects, his use of color, and his composition.

Renoir, Jean. Renoir, My Father. Translated by Randolph Weaver and Dorothy Weaver. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. The artist’s son, a film director, recounts his father’s life, touching on the artist’s friends, travels, tastes, and beliefs. The reproductions are few and in black and white, but the volume includes photographs of the artist and his family, and pictures of Manet, Camille Pissarro, and Cézanne.

Sagner-Düchting, Karin. Renoir, Paris and the Belle Epoque. New York: Prestel, 1996. Examines how Paris was a primary influence on Renoir’s paintings, with analysis of the nudes, portraits, and plein air paintings created there.

“Special Section: A Renoir Symposium.” Art in America 74 (March, 1986): 102-125. Includes the responses of various scholars to the 1986 Renoir retrospective held at the Grand Palais in Paris, the National Gallery in London, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Suggests that Renoir’s reputation seems either to be on the wane or undergoing a major reassessment (with greater importance, for example, accorded the late glowing nudes).

Wadley, Nicholas, ed. Renoir: A Retrospective. New York: H. L. Levin, 1987. This authoritative work has contemporary accounts and evaluations.

Wheldon, Keith. Renoir and His Art. New York: Hamlyn, 1975. A brief but readable account of the life and development of Renoir’s art. Includes comments from such scholars as John Rewald and Fritz Novotny. About half of the 102 plates are in color, and some are full-page reproductions.

White, Barbara E. Renoir: His Life, Art, and Letters. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984. White’s work is useful because of its color illustrations, but its chief value lies in its use of Renoir’s correspondence. White sees much of Renoir’s work as derived from Monet and others.