AUGUSTE RENOIR
THE entire past progress of painting is condensed and expressed in each of its great men. The creation of new art cannot be accomplished overnight, any more than that of a new organism; it must stem from first impulses and be formed on the differentiations of the past. Those men who declare themselves primitives and seek to acquire the eyes and minds of the Phœnicians or Aztecs are as conscious of their inability to create new art forms as are those visionaries who live in a mythical future and try to prophesy the forms that are to come. No man is born too soon or too late. There are those who strive toward classic intellectual ideals, toward Utopian economic states, toward new orders of society: but such reformers are only the malcontents. The truly great and practical men quickly assimilate the impulses of their own epochs and push the frontiers of the mind’s possibilities further into the unknown. These latter comprise the maligned vanguard of heroic thinkers who fight the battles for their weaker followers. Often, however, these followers rise to great heights, for in the world of endeavour two conspicuous types exist—the man who experiments and the man who achieves. Delacroix, Manet and the Impressionists belong to the first; Courbet and Renoir are of the second.
In Renoir’s life story, as in that of Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt, we see in miniature the evolution of all the painting that preceded him—the bitter struggles with the chimeras of convention, and each slow change that came over drawing, style, colour and composition. In the end, after a life full of near defeats, strife, yearning and anxiety, we behold the great man emerge triumphantly from his broken fetters and take his place beside the masters of the past. Some painters have more arduous fights than others, for the odds against them are greater. Rubens and Delacroix seemed the pampered favourites of a high destiny: Courbet and Renoir had to cleave and chisel each step of the way through the adamant of public suspicion. The world appears incapable of recognising either an intensification or a modification of an old and accepted formula. Hence Courtois and Puget were preferred to Delacroix; Ribera and Rembrandt to Courbet; the Avignon painters to Manet; Corot, Diaz and Rousseau to the Impressionists; and Rubens and Ingres to Renoir. In all of these parallelisms, the latter had their roots in the former. They were complications and variations of their forerunners—dissimilar only in method and manner.
Renoir began to paint at an early age. The poverty of his family necessitated him to make his own living, and at the age of thirteen he was in a factory painting porcelains. Five years later he applied for work at a place given over to the decoration of transparent screens. Here his unusual facility permitted him to paint ten times as fast as his fellow decorators, and since he was paid by the piece, he soon saved enough money to give himself an education in the art which had now become with him a conscious instinct—painting. From his earliest youth he had evinced a discontent with the slow-moving minds about him, and it was natural that he should first look upon art through the eyes of his great revolutionary contemporary, Courbet. His earliest work, of which Le Cabaret de la Mère Anthony and Diane Chasseresse are the best-known examples, reflected Courbet in both palette and conception. Even later, when Manet claimed him, he clung to his first influence. For while his work now reached out toward the substance of light to be found in La Musique aux Tuileries, it revealed at the same time all the form of the Ornans master. Le Ménage Sisley and Lise strikingly combine these two early influences.
Since humanity has emerged from the darkness of unconsciousness and the individual from the darkness of the womb, it is consistent with nature that in a man’s creative development—the route of which lies between dark and dark—the use of black should be his first instinct. Renoir, like all painters of great promise, started with this negation of colour. But wherein his intellectual distinction manifested itself was his innate proclivity for the rhythm of surface lines which he alone of all his contemporaries recognised in Courbet. In Lise, painted in 1867, a year after his Diane Chasseresse, both of these early penchants are evident. Black is the keynote of his sunlight; and while in conception the canvas is akin to Manet, it is a Manet made dexterous and masterly. It contains a balance and a linear rhythm of which that painter was ignorant. Lise is one of the few Renoirs into which the influence of Velazquez and Goya can be imagined. Even in its pyramidal form, which when used by most painters becomes a static figure, there is a movement at its apex which opens into a shape like a lily. This is brought about by the tilt of the sunshade and the continuation of the line of the sash outward in the tree trunk. By just such obvious and simple signs as these in early works, can we foretell an artist’s later developments.
The next year, 1868, Renoir’s work is more net, more able in its balance, more sure in its effect. Le Ménage Sisley is one of his finest early examples of how this rhythmic continuity of line obsesses a mind avid for form, colour, vitality. At first glance we see only an irregular pyramid formed by the outline of the two figures; but after a minute’s study we notice that on the right the line of the skirt curves gracefully inward to the waist-line, sweeps up to the woman’s neck, then begins an outward flexure, and finally disperses itself amid the tree’s slanting branches in the right-hand upper corner. On the left, the outline of the man’s right leg and arm and hair forms another curve which bends back the line of the opposing curve of the woman’s dress, and completes the figure of the pyramid. But the first curve, the force of which is seemingly ended at the woman’s waist, is continued in the outline of the light tonality which begins at the man’s right elbow, curves outward to the frame, then inward, and ends on the upper frame a little to the left of the man’s head. Furthermore, the volume made by the light tonality in the upper left-hand corner serves as a balance to the form of the woman’s tunic. This composition is, in all essentials, the same as in Lise, and embraces that rhythm in two dimensions which Manet did not know, and that balance of tonal form of which Manet was never capable. Manet’s mind was that of the lesser Dutch and Spaniards. Renoir’s was the plastic and flowing mind of the Latin races, never satisfied with angularity and immobility, but needful of the smooth progression of sequence and movement.
The recognition of the artistic necessity for linear rhythm led Renoir to search for it in others than Courbet. Among the painters by whom he might profit, Delacroix stood nearest his own time. To him Renoir turned; and it was out of him that Renoir’s greatness was to grow. Delacroix’s organisations appealed to him—especially the triangular one which opens at the top. His admiration for this artist’s talent led him to paint in 1872 a canvas called Parisiennes Habillées en Algériennes, an ambitious essay to compete with Les Femmes d’Alger dans Leur Appartement. Intrinsically the picture was a failure, but it taught its creator more than he had heretofore learned concerning colour and drawing. In it are discernible indications of the formal unconventionalities and the chromatic brilliancies which later were to be such dominant qualities in Renoir’s work. Although for two years he had used Impressionistic methods, it was through this picture that Delacroix introduced him to the Impressionists’ colour. Manet had already introduced him to Ingres: and these two incidents went far toward laying the foundation for his greatness. On neither the Impressionists nor Ingres did he build a style; but from both he learned something of far more value:—freedom from the dictates of style. Here again Delacroix had a hand, for by studying this artist’s uses of Ingres’s simplifications, Renoir was able to make these simplifications plastic.
Renoir’s colour up to this time had been restrained by the dictates of his epoch. But with the inspiration and encouragement given him by Les Femmes d’Alger dans Leur Appartement, it burst forth with all the force of long-imprisoned energy, and drove him out of doors. In this picture he found excuse to carry colour to any extreme he desired. At once the instincts of the porcelain painter, ever latent in him, came uppermost. Delacroix, in giving him the Impressionists’ freedom of colour, had brought him back to those rich and full little designs he had painted on china between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. In this early training alone lies the explanation of his later matière which has for so long puzzled the critics. Many attribute his colour effects to Watteau. But Renoir had developed his technique before he knew the older master. Years previous he had been intensely interested in the very material of his models. In Le Ménage Sisley, La Baigneuse au Griffon and La Femme à la Perruche is evinced the love of the connoisseur for rare and rich stuffs. Furthermore he had begun to turn his eyes toward Impressionist methods two years before he painted Les Parisiennes Habillées en Algériennes. Up to that time his brushing had been broad like Manet’s or Courbet’s; immediately afterward it tended toward spotting, and Monet took the upper hand. Watteau’s manner of application served only to substantiate Renoir in his choice of method.
The years from 1865 to 1876 constitute a period of Renoir’s life rich in its promise of splendid things. His keen admirations and high enthusiasms made of him throughout this time a disciple. But his achievements, small as they were, were more sumptuous and effectual than either Manet’s or Monet’s. Their true significance, though, lay in their assurance of what was to come after he had completed that unlearning process through which all great men must pass. Only by sitting at a master’s feet can one acquire the knowledge that informs one which influences should be utilised and which cast aside. One cannot learn from experience the total lessons of many men, each one of whom has given a lifetime to the study of a different side of a subject. If these men are to be surpassed their life work must be used as a starting point. Renoir began thus. He had fallen under the sway of Courbet, Manet, Delacroix and Monet; but after eleven years he had exhausted his creative interest in both their theories and their attainments. These men had expressed all that was in them. For Renoir to cling to them was to stand still. If he was to go down in history as a constructive genius and not merely as an able imitator, it was time for him to strike out alone.
He did not hesitate. The portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, done in 1876, marks his transformation. In it he achieved the scintillation of light which is not linked with colour or painting, but which seems to arise, by some mysterious alchemy, from the surface of the canvas. In this picture, and also in the Moulin de la Galette, finished in the same year, he consummated the fondest ambition of the Impressionists, namely: to make the spectator feel a picture, not as a depiction of nature’s light, but as a medium from which emanates the very force of light itself. But Renoir did not stop here: to this achievement he added form and rhythm—two attributes which the Impressionists, preoccupied with objectivity, were too busy to attempt. And in addition he displayed a technique so perfect in its adaptability to any expression, that its mannerisms were completely submerged in the picture’s total effect. These were the qualities which Renoir was to develop to so superlative a degree. He had begun to express form in 1870 in his Portrait de Dame. Two years later in his Delacroix adaptation he had branched out into colour. And in his very first canvases there was rhythmic balance of lines. In 1876 all these tendencies coalesced. In consequence Renoir blossomed forth free from aggressive influences, knowing his own limitations and possibilities. This cannot be said even of those excellent works, La Loge, La Danseuse and La Fillette Attentive, done the two preceding years. It is only by contemplating such pictures as the portrait of Mlle. Durand-Ruel, La Chevelure and La Source that we can perceive the path along which his development was to take place. For these canvases, though far more significant than the works of Pissarro and Monet, are almost negligible beside his later work. He was a man never satisfied with results, no matter how exalted. His every new achievement was only a higher elevation from which his horizon ever receded.