Of course it is possible to soak oneself in Cézanne to such an extent that almost everything else will seem uninteresting. But this is not a magnetism peculiar to Cézanne; it is common to all artists of any comprehensive range, not excepting Renoir. Pass quickly after enjoying a collection of Renoir's completest and most lucid work to some of Cézanne's paintings. Most probably they will appear wooden and unattractive. But this will be a psychological illusion, due to a sudden contrast and the fact that the whole of one's emotional consciousness has been shaped to a certain form, and will not immediately reshape itself. Our minds at any single moment are unable to contain more than a few powerful conceptions and impressions, and there must therefore be times of clashing and transition.
But there is a sense in which Renoir might very well be described as naïf and ingenuous. This would refer not to his method or technique, but to the spiritual content of his work, what he means and has to say. The centre of his enjoyment lay always in something charming, radiant, opulent, and, if you like, sensuous. And so those who are ascetically disposed, if not in their life, in their tastes, condemn Renoir as pretty and sentimental. But often they go further and conclude that he was facile, that he painted without difficulty or trouble, as the birds sing. It may, however, have been as difficult for him to attain a satisfactory expression of his emotion, which was of facility, as it was for Cézanne to express his intense consciousness of beauty struck out of conflicting opposites. Indeed, very often there are distinct indications of a struggle in Renoir, of inability to get exactly what he was aiming at. A superficial glance might put this down to bad elementary draughtsmanship. But one has only to consider the technical proficiency of his earlier work (see "Le Cabaret de la Mere Antony, Diane Chasseresse") to realise that the cause of this apparent ineptitude must be deeper. It is the honesty of the artist who is always developing and refuses to overcome difficulties by resort to the camouflage of the obvious and the hackneyed. Consequently the very failure has its appeal.
Different Periods
There is a great deal of difference of opinion as to the respective value of Renoir's earlier and his later work, and this has afforded an excellent opportunity for the conflicting schools, who all join in admiring Renoir, to set up within this ostensible "union sacrée" their old party divisions. The conservatives adhere, of course, to the first great period from 1870–1881; that is to say between Renoir's thirtieth and fortieth years. In the rest they see a gradual decline of inspiration, an increasing predilection for rotund and almost coarse sensuousness, a pathetic loss of technical power until, when tortured by gout and hopelessly paralysed, the old master could only apply chaotic dabs of hot and hotter colour, his work became worthless. The extremists, on the other hand, see a steady, though uneven, development. They admit readily the enchantment of the period of early maturity when Renoir was at the height of his physical powers, but they have an uncomfortable feeling that this kind of art is a trifle too normal, it is something that practically anyone can enjoy with a little effort. The later work is more difficult. Renoir never lost his peculiar charm, even when painting the fattest of models (his model, I think, just grew fatter), but he experimented in different directions, passing from the study of light more and more to that of form. Latterly, when an invalid, he was compelled to confine himself within narrower bounds, and the appeal of his work has less volume in it. Nevertheless, it is maintained these last are the two greatest periods, if not in positive achievement, at any rate in intention.
I am disposed, if anything, to favour the work done in the first two phases, between his thirtieth and sixtieth years, and I am not sure that some of his most perfect pictures do not belong to the earlier of the two. For he did not produce many perfect pictures; it is nearly always possible to trace some defect. For instance, there has recently been exhibited at the Eldar Gallery one of the remarkable series of "Baigneuses." This particular canvas was painted in 1888. There is a great deal that is very beautiful in it, but it is not a whole. It is a "studio" picture, the nude and the landscape have no inevitable connection, and little interest is displayed in the face. Further, the body is cut off, or rather smoothed off, from its environment by a swish of paint, which signifies nothing, except that Renoir became too excited by the actual touch and feel and putting on of the paint, and also that he had an idée fixe about the gradual merging of the outline into its surroundings. This was the sentimental echo of his former genuine enthusiasm for plein-air effects. In many of his otherwise admirable figure studies this spongy film (especially affecting the hands) spoils the precision of his rendering. Sometimes, however, it is appropriate; for instance, in the famous picture, "La Moulin de la Galette" (1876). Here the flowing atmospheric technique and the significance coincide. The radiant coolness of the dappled light and shade is expressed with a freedom and spontaneity which is often lacking in Monet and Pisarro. Yet in spite of the unalloyed delight of this dancing scene I always feel a lurking criticism. This is not because of the kind of sentiment which might be mistaken for sentimentality; it is due to something else, a sameness and repetition. There is an absence of diversity in these light-hearted revellers; in fact they are just one man and one woman duplicated many times over, and flushed with exactly the same translucent emotion. Renoir did not possess great constructive imaginative power, and he had very little interest in character. This general limitation, however, only became a concrete limitation (that is to say, a defect observable inside a picture, instead of one of the infinite things that the picture is not) when he was actually portraying some scene necessitating a variety of individual characters.
It is in some of his landscapes, or in portrait heads such as that of Madame Charpentier, or studies such as "La Loge," and some of the later nudes that there is the completest fusion of the content and the form, of the technique and the emotion. It is frequently said that Renoir was not a landscape painter, but was par excellence a painter of women or of woman. The latter statement undoubtedly has some truth in it, although the interest was not so much in woman as in a particular roseate emotion, more evident in women than in men. But he was also a very considerable landscape painter, and his figures of women are usually placed in the open air, amid scenery possessing the same soft and sweeping texture. Even when an invalid he still painted out of doors, in a specially constructed glass house, while his model posed, often naked, in his garden.
About 1881 he seems to have exhausted his direct interest in the plein-air movement. Incidentally, he took a journey to Italy, but there is no evidence of any influence of this visit upon his work, except that it may have served to throw into stronger relief the peculiarities of the French school and his own kinship with it—that school which (in his own phrase) "est si gentille, si clair, de si bonne compagnie."
This, however, is least applicable to the artist towards whom his own inner development seems to have guided him, namely Ingres. To put it in the usual superficial and rather unsatisfactory way, he was passing from the study of light to that of two dimensional form. The actual result was a synthesis in which brilliant colour and light played a part never dreamt of by Ingres. At first his work showed an unusual hardness and lack of skill. He never possessed the sureness of touch of Manet, which often was mere virtuosity; nor does one ever feel behind his hand the overwhelming impetuosity of Van Gogh. He feels his way gradually, producing a great deal, in fact too much, and succeeding only in certain moments. The culmination was reached in the large composition of the four bathers (which I have not seen) in the collection of M. J. E. Blanche. Opinion seems to differ as to its value, but, whatever defects it may possess, it is clearly of a monumental character, and probably represents the highest point that Renoir was able to attain in the attempt to bring together the sculpturesque qualities of one of his first large compositions, "Diane Chasseresse," and the luminosity and richness of the "Moulin de la Galette."
Between the years 1885 and 1897 there followed a whole succession of remarkable pictures, including "Les Enfants Benard," "Mère et Enfant," "Les Filles de Catulle Mendès," "Les Parapluies," and "Au Piano," of which there are two examples, one being at the Luxembourg. Although Renoir was moving away from his former softness and mistiness, as if in dissatisfaction with the youthful joy in mere sensation, he never left it right behind, he remained on the borderland and looked back on it, contemplating it with maturer insight.