| LE DÉJEUNER DES CANOTIERS | RENOIR |
One of Renoir’s important advances in method is his liberation from the circumscribed use of black. Although in some of his work of 1876 there are still traces of that tone used organically, they are so slight that they may be disregarded. Black was the very keynote of the paintings of his day. It was looked upon as a necessity in the creation of volumes. Courbet did little without it, and Manet brightened it only with occasional flashes of colour. Today we know that it is not a technical necessity, that pure colours, in fact, when properly used, can produce the most solid forms. But whereas we have been able to profit by the teachings of Cézanne and the Synchromists, Renoir had to learn this fact by bitter experiments in a new element. In La Balançoire, done in the same year as the Moulin de la Galette and now hanging with that picture in the Luxembourg, black is entirely absent. This little canvas was probably an experiment actuated by Monet, for never afterward did he on principle lay black aside. While he realised its unimportance as a fundamental for constructing volume, he nevertheless felt its need as a complement to colour—the need of the static and the dead to accentuate the plastic and alive.
It is during this period that critics are prone to see Gainsborough in Renoir. But their reasons for such a comparison are superficial, and go no further than the fact that both painters dealt with feminine themes in a similarly intimate manner. No genuinely artistic likeness can be found between Mrs. Siddons, for instance, and the Ingénue. The one is merely a spirited portrait without composition or tactility: the other is an exquisite bit of form and colour, which we feel would be as solid to the touch as it appears to the eye. If we are to compare Renoir to English painters at all, let us designate Hogarth and Romney, although any such comparative method of criticism is apt to lead at once to misunderstanding. However, even these two men are distinctly inadequate as measures for Renoir. In the graphic arts Englishmen exhibit no feeling for rhythm. Indeed, it may correctly be said they possess no graphic arts. Rhythm is a factor which has made itself felt only in their poetry, and here it can hardly be called more than a division of interval, or tempo. Rossetti in his paintings is seemingly more conscious of its power than any other Englishman, and occasionally attempted to produce it by the primitive device of curved lines. But, after all, Rossetti was Italian. On the whole Renoir and the English artists are two fundamentally dissimilar to be estimated relatively. The finest qualities of Renoir’s art grew out of his instinct for fluent movement, for intense undulations, for hot gorgeous colour, for freedom from all traditional prescriptions.
The evolution of these instincts was by no means a mechanical one. After he had amalgamated the leading qualities of his art, his interest would often reveal itself more strongly in one direction than another. Thus many of his canvases show a retrogression toward emphasis of light; others toward form; still others toward linear rhythm. Yet no matter which one of these qualities predominated, the others also remained intact. More importance, however, attached to his preoccupation with the treatment of light. His experiments and consequent development in this field are of initial significance in judging his later work. In 1878 he had evidently foreseen the cul-de-sac into which the natural distribution of light would lead. The very volatility and translucency of illumination and its matter-dispelling qualities, constituted the greatest drawback to its use in the creation of form. In other words its sheer beauty nullified the deeper aims of painting. In two decorative Panneaux of reclining nudes, done in the same year, Renoir makes his first attempt to escape from the naturalism of light. The use of light is here restricted to a colour force which serves only to bring form into relief. From that time on, although he had many struggles with its power over him, he had conquered its insidious influence. It became his servant, whereas before it had been his master. In his earlier canvases, wherein sunlight had played a leading part, he had placed the sun patches, gleaming and vibrant, wherever they naturally fell. After 1878 he began placing them arbitrarily on points where formal projection was needed.
The subtle manner in which he constructed and posed these patches precluded any discovery of his reasons for altering their natural location. But Renoir was not fully satisfied, and soon abandoned this phase of pleinairisme. Later the spots of sunlight appeared on cheeks, shoulders, knees, or any other salients which called for powerful relief, thereby losing their flat and detached appearance. This moulding of them into intense aggregations had much to do with Renoir’s fullness of form. His long experience had given him a complete knowledge of their naturalistic effect. He knew it was impossible to make them remain on the same plane with the surrounding shadow, and he understood the reasons for this phenomenon. It was not therefore remarkable that, in his later method of applying them, he was sure of his results. As soon as he realised that sunlight dispersed matter by obscuring some points and accentuating others, he knew that by an intelligent employment of this factor of luminosity he could at will accentuate certain parts of his canvas and obscure others. This knowledge led him naturally to create his own light, irrespective of how it actually existed. This was an important step toward its complete abrogation, and brought arbitrary means in painting just so much nearer. He had already distorted volumes for purposes of organisation in the same manner that he now distorted light. Indeed every great painter has taken this liberty with form; but each one has to learn the device anew in its relation to his own separate vision.
There are few shadows, as such, in Renoir. We find darks and lights in scintillating succession, but we may search in vain, even in his canvases of 1878 or 1879, for those shadowed outlines which are the result of light. If light there is, it is only the light which springs from our own eyes—light which seems to come from the direction of the beholder, like the reflection of a light in water. Move as you will before his pictures, it follows you, for it is the illumination of that part of the picture nearest the eyes of the painter. Where a form is full, there Renoir contrives to have a light fall. This artifice may strike us today as childish, since we have outgrown our concern with light; but let us remember that from the beginning the depiction of lights and shadows had been a fixed practice, and that their tones had formed the only basis for chiaroscuro. With the Impressionists light became the atout of painting. Renoir made of it a vital form-creating element. Herein we have its evolution: first, a convention; next, an obsession; last, a utility. So were the æsthetic possibilities of light exhausted, just as the æsthetic possibilities of the human form were exhausted by Michelangelo.
In this last step of liberating light from convention, Renoir approached nearer to nature than any antecedent painter. After all, a human being in the sunlight appears to us as a solid moving mass. Only those who look upon nature as a flat pattern of shades and lights are misled by sun patches. So, in Renoir’s adapting the source of light for the purpose of producing solidity of form, we are cognisant of the palpability of his figures whether they are in light or shadow, or both. Thus he created the actual impression of volume we all get before a moving form. This arbitrary disposition of light and shadow also gave fullness and intensity to his form, and accentuated the poise, so subtle and unexpected, we feel in even his slightest works. But while this was the secret of his attainment of volume, the compositional use to which he put this volume requires another explanation—one which has its roots in the very depths of the man’s genius. There had never been such form in the French school as that which Renoir gave it in 1880. The Tête de Jeune Fille and Les Enfants en Rose et Bleu, done about this time, must have been the despair of even the sculptors of his day. And these were but the beginning. Many phases of his art were yet to be emphasised and developed before the Renoir we know today was to be perfected.
It was in 1884 that he began to “apprendre le dessin.” For four years he continued this self-training in the precision of draughtsmanship. As a boy he had begun his painting in a manner more competent than the most advanced style of the average artist, as is evidenced by the able use of colour as design in his early porcelains. And although he was driven to this work by necessity, the incident was a salutary one. It turned his thoughts toward those abstract organisations of colour which always afterward haunted him. Later he learned all the tricks of the day in the school of the realists, and succeeded in surpassing his masters. Next he studied the Impressionists and went beyond them also. Then he co-ordinated his knowledge and established his individual greatness. This period of his development gave France much of its finest painting, and his Baigneuse done at this time is an undoubted masterpiece. His reversion to the rudiments of drawing was the result of a burning desire to develop rhythm and form. His technical difficulties had been conquered at an early date: he needed only dexterity in drawing to achieve his end. Not only did Renoir attain to his objective, but, by comprehending the principle of the placements and displacements of volumes, he learned the advantages of line accentuation in obtaining movement.