Renoir
Page 1
About the Author
Barbara Ehrlich White is Adjunct Professor Emerita of Art History, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts. Her Renoir: His Life, Art and Letters (Abrams, 1984) has sold over 125,000 copies. She is also the author of Impressionism in Perspective (Prentice-Hall, 1978) and Impressionists Side by Side (Knopf, 1996). She was encouraged to write the biography of the artist by Renoir’s family, and her receipt of the prestigious French honour, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, followed recommendation by the artist’s great-granddaughter Sophie Renoir.
Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:
The Letters of Paul Cézanne
In the Gardens of Impressionism
Impressionism: origins, practice, reception
Edgar Degas: Drawings and Pastels
See our websites
www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my husband and best friend, Leon, who, since 1961, has been a constant source of encouragement; to our sons, Joel and David; to our granddaughters, Ella and Nina; and to our daughter-in-law, Heidi. Also, I would like to thank my adviser and mentor, the late Professor Meyer Schapiro who, in 1961, suggested that I make Renoir the subject of my doctoral dissertation; this led to my lifelong study of Renoir.
CONTENTS
Maps
Introduction
Chapter 1
1841–77
Chapter 2
1878–84
Chapter 3
1885–93
Chapter 4
1894–1900
Chapter 5
1901–09
Chapter 6
1910–15
Chapter 7
1915–19
Afterword
Appendix: Selected Renoir Paintings Worldwide
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Photograph Credits
Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright
Map of Paris showing Renoir’s studios and apartments
ADDRESSES OF RENOIR’S STUDIOS AND APTS:
(1)23 rue d’Argenteuil, studio and apt (1st arr.)
(2)43 avenue d’Eylau and apt (16th arr.)
(3)20 rue Visconti (with Bazille), studio and apt (6th arr.)
(4)9 rue de la Paix (with Bazille), studio and apt (2nd arr.)
(5)8 rue des Beaux-Arts (with Bazille), studio and apt (6th arr.)
(6)5 rue Taranne (between 170 and 260 boulevard Saint-Germain), studio and apt (6th arr.)
(7)Rue du Dragon, studio and apt (6th arr.)
(8)34 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, studio and apt (6th arr.)
(9)Rue Norvins, studio and apt (18th arr.)
(10)35 rue Saint-Georges, studio and apt (9th arr.)
(11)12–14 rue Cortot, studio (18th arr.)
(12)18 rue Houdon, apt (18th arr.)
(13)35 boulevard Rochechouart, studio (18th arr.)
(14)11 boulevard de Clichy, studio (9th arr.)
(15)15 rue Hégésippe-Moreau, studio (18th arr.)
(16)13 rue Girardon (6 Allée des Brouillards), house (18th arr.)
(17)7 rue Tourlaque, studio (18th arr.)
(18)33 rue de la Rochefoucauld, apt (9th arr.)
(19)64 rue de la Rochefoucauld, studio (9th arr.)
(20)43 rue Caulaincourt, apt (18th arr.)
(21)73 rue Caulaincourt, studio (18th arr.)
(22)57 bis boulevard Rochechouart (studio and apt) (9th arr.)
Map of France showing places associated with Renoir
Dance at Bougival, 1883. 179.7 × 96 cm (70⅝ × 37¾ in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
INTRODUCTION
Jean Renoir’s immensely popular 1958 biography, Renoir, My Father, is historical fiction, written by Renoir’s middle son, the internationally renowned director and producer of forty-one films.1 Jean affirms his intent in his preface: ‘The Reader: It is not Renoir you are presenting to us, but your own conception of him. The Author: Of course, History is a subjective genre, after all.’2 Professor Robert L. Herbert writes in his introduction to the latest, 2001, edition of Renoir, My Father: ‘the appeal and the value of Jean Renoir’s book is in his imaginative reconstruction of the time and the personages of his father’s paintings’.3 Here Herbert does not say ‘of his father’, but ‘of his father’s paintings’. In Renoir, My Father, paintings such as Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette and Luncheon of the Boating Party come alive but the character and personality of Renoir remain elusive.
In 1919, when Jean Renoir was twenty-five, his father died aged seventy-eight. Forty years later, in 1958, Jean wrote Renoir, My Father. This loving tribute is censored. Jean and his brothers learned from their father’s will, which they saw only after his death, that Renoir had been a devoted father to a secret illegitimate daughter.4 Jean also knew that his parents’ marriage changed from a love affair to estrangement. In Renoir, My Father, Renoir’s daughter is not mentioned; Jean portrays his parents’ marriage as happy. Jean’s book has no bibliography and no notes. It quotes two undated letters from Jean’s mother to his father. It was not Jean’s intention to help the reader understand Renoir’s character or personality.
Unlike Renoir, My Father, my biography is the result of fifty-six years of professional concentration on Renoir’s paintings, character and personality. Renoir: An Intimate Biography is based on the factual evidence of more than three thousand letters written by, to and about Renoir during his lifetime, as well as diaries and contemporary interviews. This life story is the culmination of my insatiable fascination with the great painter Renoir: a 1961 doctoral dissertation written under the direction of the brilliant Professor Meyer Schapiro at Columbia University; a 1978 anthology, Impressionism in Perspective; a 1984 book, Renoir: His Life, Art, and Letters, that is still in print; a 1996 book, Impressionists Side by Side, that includes one chapter on Renoir and Monet and one on Renoir and Berthe Morisot; a 2005 chapter in a book on Jean Renoir and Renoir; and articles in scholarly journals about Renoir, as well as more than forty years of university teaching and public lectures about Renoir.5
While Jean Renoir’s memoir is moving as a loving tribute by a son to his father, Renoir: An Intimate Biography informs the reader that Renoir was an inspiring and heroic individual who overcame daunting obstacles – thirty years of poverty followed by thirty years of paralysing illness. Throughout these sixty years Renoir was not only extremely prolific but also amazingly generous.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir is one of the greatest and most creative artists who ever lived. He made 4,654 original works of art: 4,019 paintings, 148 pastels, 382 drawings and 105 watercolours.6 Today his international popularity is evident: his works hang in museums around the world (see the Appendix) and he is recognized as one of the supreme Impressionists.7 His contemporaries, too, recognized his genius: in 1914, when Matisse, Monet and Picasso were well known, the art critic Guillaume Apollinaire placed Renoir above them all by declaring: ‘Renoir [is] the greatest living painter, whose least production is hungrily awaited by a whole legion of dealers and collectors.’8
Since there is no Renoir anthology of letters, in 1961 I began collecting copies of published and unpublished letters by, to and about Renoir written during his lifetime. In writing Renoir: His Life, Art, and Letters, I knew about 1,000 such letters. Throughout the subsequent thirty years, I have collected copies of an additional 2,000 letters, many of which were unpublished: they came from the heirs of the family of Renoir’s illegitimate daughter, Jeanne Tréhot; from the heirs of Renoir’s son Coco, who inherited the family’s letter archive; from the heirs of Renoir’s sons Pierre and Jean; from the heirs of Renoir’s fellow artists, friends and p
atrons; from the heirs of Renoir’s dealer Durand-Ruel; from the recently opened public archives of Mary Cassatt’s letters at the Metropolitan Museum in New York,9 of Vollard’s correspondence at the Bibliothèque des Musées Nationaux in Paris, of Albert André’s correspondence at the Fondation Custodia in Paris, as well as from catalogues of letter sales, from letter dealers and from letter archives.10 Hence, this biography is based on knowledge of the contents of more than 3,000 letters by, to and about Renoir. Embedded in my text are quotations from 1,100 letters, including 452 short quotations from 346 unpublished letters. These letters are powerful time-capsules that enable us to be in direct contact with Renoir and his contemporaries through their words.
In my search for letters, I was fortunate enough to meet several people who knew Renoir: Renoir’s son Coco, his nephew Edmond Renoir junior, Julie Manet Rouart and Philippe Gangnat. Besides in-person interviews, they all owned letters that they allowed me to copy.
These three thousand letters by, to and about Renoir that were written during his lifetime shed light on his relationships, especially on those with key women in his life. They include Renoir’s letters to his illegitimate daughter, Jeanne Tréhot; to his model and wife, Aline Charigot; to others that mention his later model and companion, Gabrielle Renard; to the Impressionist artist, Berthe Morisot, and to her daughter, Julie Manet, whose seven-year diary sheds light on Renoir’s close relationship with her mother, with her and with her cousins; and Renoir’s letters to his student, Jeanne Baudot.
The extraordinarily gregarious Renoir also had many important relationships with men, all of which are clarified and documented in letters. These include interactions with his sons (Pierre, Jean, Coco); with artist friends (André, Bonnard, Bazille, Caillebotte, Cézanne, Degas, Denis, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Sisley); with patron friends (Bérard, Charpentier, Duret, Gallimard, Gangnat); with dealer friends (Bernheim, Durand-Ruel, Vollard); and with his dealers’ sons (Charles, Georges, and Joseph Durand-Ruel, Gaston and Josse Bernheim).
Friendships with men and women even extended into the next generation since Renoir was warm and supportive of his friends’ children, especially Berthe Morisot’s daughter, Julie Manet; Rivière’s daughter, Renée; Cézanne’s son, Paul Cézanne junior.
Renoir’s important interactions with these women and men, as revealed through letters and diaries, enable us to understand better the complex, maddeningly ambivalent, yet endearing Renoir. Based on this primary source information, we can explore the central question of this biography: what was Renoir’s character and personality?
On this subject, Renoir’s friend, the artist Camille Pissarro, was most insightful in 1887 when he wrote: ‘Who can fathom that most inconsistent of men?’11 Pissarro’s word ‘inconsistent’ can also be translated as changeable, enigmatic, fickle and unpredictable. From my perspective, the best translation of Pissarro’s ‘inconsistent’ is ‘unfathomable’. Indeed, Renoir was conflict-avoiding, double-talking, secretive, shrewd and even sneaky. To stay in the good graces of those on whom he depended, he ingratiated himself with friends of different opinions whose favour he needed. This led him sometimes to express diverse thoughts on the same topic to different acquaintances. Like many people, Renoir’s dependent and needy behaviour was often contradictory. At one time or another, he could be gregarious or timid, generous or stingy, passive or aggressive, dependent or independent, indecisive or strong-minded and open or secretive.
Renoir’s avowals often contradicted his actions. For example, he wrote to his patrons, the Charpentiers, that he was ‘the timid man’ yet, at the same time, he regularly asked them for money; he also requested to draw ‘the fashion of the week’ in their weekly newspaper, and asked them to give his journalist brother, Edmond, a job. Shrewd and calculating, he was more than willing to manipulate those around him to get his way. To avoid conflict, Renoir frequently operated behind people’s backs rather than confronting them. For example, he never told his eventual wife, Aline, that he had fathered a child eight years before they met – a child he had resolved not to abandon. Renoir’s motive for keeping this secret was to prevent Aline from interfering in his relationship with his beloved daughter, who strikingly resembled her parents – Renoir and his model and first love, Lise. Another example of his shrewd cunning is more mundane: after Aline had picked out an apartment that Renoir did not like, Renoir arranged that she be told ‘the landlord does not want any painters’ so as to avoid a confrontation.12
The complexity of his interactions no doubt worsened Renoir’s lifelong high level of anxiety. He had a nervous tick; patrons described his ‘unbearable nervous movements’, when he constantly rubbed his index finger under his nose.13 When he was mobile, he constantly paced back and forth. Throughout his life he chain-smoked but, luckily, never developed lung cancer.
Beyond Renoir’s wheeler-dealer, manipulative and self-serving character, the letters also reveal his basic generosity, goodness and loyalty to family and friends. Most surprising was his fifty-year secret relationship with his daughter, Jeanne, whose mother never contacted her. Renoir, in contrast, steadfastly supported her. At Jeanne’s moment of greatest need (when she had a probable miscarriage at the same time that her husband died), Renoir wrote her: ‘I have never abandoned you. I am doing what I can. I have no reason not to take care of you.’14 Besides his faithfulness to his daughter, he was generous to his friends. For example, Renoir found a patron and an art dealer for Cézanne, who was the artist he most admired. Also, Renoir was extraordinarily generous with his time throughout four years during which he gave psychological support to the young Julie Manet after the death of both of her parents; at the same time he extended this kindness to Julie’s two orphan cousins, Jeannie and Paule Gobillard. Renoir was likewise generous to Caillebotte, to Cézanne’s son, Paul Cézanne junior, to Berthe Morisot, to Rivière’s daughters, Hélène and Renée, to many young artists (including André, Bonnard, Denis, Matisse, Schnerb). Renoir’s generosity extended to men and women, young and old, rich and poor, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish.
We now may wonder why the gregarious Renoir placed so much value in avoiding conflict with those around him. During the six decades that he painted, he was consistently struggling – first, with almost thirty years of poverty or precarious finances, and then, with thirty years of progressive paralysis from rheumatoid arthritis. Renoir came from a lower-class artisan background. His family’s patriarch, his father’s father, had been abandoned at birth and then rescued by a wooden-shoemaker and his family. This most humble beginning was the core of Renoir’s modest and grateful attitude towards the world. Renoir always felt like an outsider in the upper-class art world. Friends were a lifeline for him; they were the source of the financial help, professional contacts and companionship that enabled him to paint despite continuous daunting obstacles. To confront a friend would be to endanger not only the relationship he valued on an emotional level but also his chance of survival as an artist in a world in which he always felt like an interloper.
In a career of almost sixty years and despite the many hardships he suffered, Renoir created more than four thousand paintings that celebrate beauty, joyfulness and sensuality. His images were his ideal and his escape, not his real world. With all of the complications and problems in his personal life, his work was a ‘grand illusion’ (Jean Renoir’s greatest movie was Grand Illusion, in which, as in all of his films, there are similarities to his father’s paintings).15 In contrast to his anxious personality, the people in his paintings are calm and relaxed. During his last three decades, when sickness caused him to become weak and shrivelled, his figures became increasingly vigorous and voluptuous. In fact, Renoir was aware of the made-up world that he was creating for others and for himself. Nine years before his death, he wrote: ‘Thanks be to painting which even late in life still furnishes illusions and sometimes joy.’16
Renoir was passionately in love with painting – both the process and the result. When fifty-five years old, he wrote to
a minor painter: ‘I also really enjoyed hearing about your painting…. You yourself have to be thrilled with what your own brain does well in order to excite others. I think it is the only way [to excite others]…. I am painting lots of [paintings of two-year-old] Jean these days, and I assure you that this is not easy but it is so pretty. And I assure you that I am working for myself, only for myself.’17 At his death, Renoir’s studios contained more than 720 of his paintings, which reveals his attachment to his creations.
What was most tragic in Renoir’s life was the change in his ability to paint because of the progressive paralysis of his fingers from rheumatoid arthritis. While Renoir was poor, he had no physical disabilities. Beginning in 1864 when he was twenty-three and throughout the next twenty-four years, his painting was at its most brilliant. However, in 1888, when Renoir was forty-seven, his health began to suffer from the progressive paralysis of his fingers. By 1890, he had finally achieved fame and fortune: the international recognition of the superb quality of his paintings. Sadly, throughout the thirty-one years from 1888 until his death in 1919, Renoir’s fingers became more distorted, making it more difficult to paint detail. In essence, Renoir was painting with a severe disability. Nonetheless, in a heroic display of self-confidence, determination and courage, he continued to paint every day, as a 1915 video of him painting aged seventy-four shows us today.18 Until the end, Renoir painted with optimism, as his friend André relayed to his dealer in 1917, ‘as if he had forty more years to live’.19 Knowing full well that because of his disability his later painting was usually not as accomplished as formerly, nonetheless Renoir continued painting every day. For him, ‘good enough’ painting with his handicap was much better than not painting at all. This is an extraordinary example of modesty, courage, generosity and optimism that benefited his two sons, who both became disabled by war injuries. This inspiring attitude towards his work continues to benefit all who are lucky enough to learn about it.