Many of the foregoing remarks apply equally to Pissarro’s close comrade and friend, Renoir. Auguste Renoir was born in 1841, and has always taken an important place in the Impressionist movement. His work forms an epitome of the whole school, and perhaps it is for that very reason that the artist has not attained a higher popular appreciation. During his forty years of continual labour he has produced landscapes, seascapes, large subject compositions, studies of still-life, portraits, and exquisite nudes. Critics, charged with enthusiasm, have found in his canvases the finest traits of Boucher, Fragonard, Greuze, Reynolds, and Hoppner.
Renoir is above all the painter of women and children, and his creations in this genre glow with the sure fire of genius. He renders in a marvellous fashion the subtle play of light upon flesh. His portraits are charming and typically French, graceful in line and rich in colour, drawn with extraordinary skill, and with great truth to nature. In the portraits of Bonnat and Duran, writes a German critic, there are people who have “sat,” but here are people from whom the painter has had the power of stealing and holding fast the secret of their being at a moment when they were not “sitting.” Here are dreamy blond girls gazing out of their great blue eyes, ethereal fragrant flowers, like lilies leaning against a rose-bush through which the rays of the setting sun are shining. Here are coquettish young girls, now laughing, now pouting, now blythe and gay, and now angry once more, now faltering between both moods in a charming passion. And there are women of the world, of consummate elegance, slender and lightly built figures, with small hands and feet, an even pallor, almond-shaped eyes catching every light, moist shining lips of a tender grace, bearing witness to a love of pleasure refined by artifice. And children especially there are, children of sensitive and flexuous race; some as yet unconscious, dreamy and free from thought; others already animated, correct in pose, graceful, and wise. Good examples of this artist as portraitist are to be found in the pictures Le loge, and On the Terrace, the latter a most delightful composition.
Another famous canvas by Renoir is the Bal au Moulin de la Galette, a most trying theme in which the master has triumphed over every difficulty. Degas would have conceived the composition in a very different spirit, throwing stress upon the sordidness of this scene from low life, adding a bitterness which is quite foreign to the temperament of Renoir, whose dominant note is one of sunlight and noisy dust-enveloped pleasure.
Criticising the work of Renoir from a purely technical point of view one finds throughout almost the whole of his work an unpleasant tone of Prussian blue, which strikes one at times as spotty and crude. The handling of the large-sized portrait groups seems often unnecessarily coarse and repellent. Many find it hard to appreciate his landscapes, considering them to be thin, of a greasy woolly texture, unatmospheric and lacking many of the qualities one looks for in such representations of nature.
PASTEL PORTRAIT OF CÉZANNE · AUGUSTE RENOIR
AT THE PIANO · AUGUSTE RENOIR
The work of Auguste Renoir will always remain a battlefield for the critics. The champions of the group acclaim him as one of its most brilliant members. Renoir is voluptuous, bright, happy, and learned without heaviness, says M. Camille Mauclair, adding that the artist is intoxicated with the beauties of flowers, flesh, and sunlight.
Rare are the artists who distinguish themselves in every branch of art, lucky the man who excels in one. An example of the latter is Alfred Sisley, “paysagist” pure and simple, who has left a legacy of some of the most fascinating landscapes ever painted.