Renoir’s heroic behaviour was eloquently described a year before his death by one of his young artist friends, Theo van Rijsselberghe (or Rysselberghe, 1892–1926), who was a Belgian painter born in Ghent. He wrote to his wife in 1918: ‘I can’t adequately describe how impressed I was by my visit to Renoir; it is pathetic, painful and at the same time very inspiring to see a being, infirm and physically disabled to such a degree, unimaginably really, retain such an ardour, such a need to create, always, always, and again. His studio is full of hundreds, that’s right, hundreds of recent paintings. There are atrocious ones and there are very beautiful ones, there are bewildering ones, but to see this man, full of life, of fire, of faith and ardour, but mutilated, half devoured by gangrene, no longer able to stand up or use his hands, which he no longer has, one is mystified and admiring. I understand that after having seen such a sight, one has an immense respect for such a human will.’20 Today we can see what van Rijsselberghe found so inspiring by watching the 1915 video of Renoir painting.
Many things that Renoir did, including painting despite his disability, contradict his self-avowed passivity (as a friend told him he often said): ‘Sometimes we resemble a cork in the water and we never know where it will lead us.’21 When Renoir said this, he was a paralysed cripple who was totally dependent on many people, yet, as always, behind the scenes, he carried on being a shrewd wheeler-dealer. Basically, he felt that his friends would be more generous if they believed him to be docile. However, those who knew him well doubtless came to understand that he was not passive but was the clever master of his fate.
Renoir was indeed smart. Despite ending his formal education at the age of twelve, he communicated his ideas about decorative and functional arts and crafts to the general public on several occasions. Artists who exhibited with the Impressionists (Caillebotte, Cassatt, Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro and Sisley) were all from upper-class and middle-class backgrounds and were better educated than was Renoir. Yet none of them wrote for the public. Perhaps Renoir was inspired to write by his eldest brother Pierre-Henri, nine years older than Renoir, a gem-engraver and medallist, who, when Renoir was twenty-two, published a book-length manual of engraved monograms and later published two other books (see Chapter 1). Renoir’s eight years younger brother, Edmond, also wanted to communicate through words and became a journalist.
All of Renoir’s publications are pleas to support craftworkers against the machine, which threatened to replace them. Renoir’s childhood work as an apprentice in a porcelain factory is relevant. At twelve, he began his career as an artisan and decorator. He was employed by the Lévy porcelain business to copy rococo images on plates and vases. After a few years, the Lévys, victims of ‘progress’, went out of business when new mechanical methods replaced hand-painting on porcelain. Renoir and many of his craftworking friends lost their jobs. In his opinion, not only was the machine-made dinnerware inferior, but many skilled workers also lost their ability to have a useful, enjoyable life.
Renoir’s three publications, in 1877, 1884 and 1911, were all fuelled by his disappointment that craftworkers were now devalued. He hoped that making his ideas public might help support these skilled artisans against the machines. These writings also show Renoir’s point of view as that of a humble worker, not of a genius artist. Renoir never forgot his shoemaker grandfather, tailor father and seamstress grandmother and mother. Throughout his life, he disdained material things and ostentation and extolled the virtues of his humble beginnings.22 These articles appeared when he was thirty-six, forty-three and seventy. In each case, he turned to a writer friend to help him edit his words. Each article was a collaboration somewhat like that with a sculptor, Guino, who translated his paintings and drawings into sculptures and reliefs from 1913 until 1917, and with Renoir’s sons Jean and Coco, who translated his oil sketches into pottery from 1916 until his death in 1919.
In 1877, Renoir suggested to a friend, the writer and government official Georges Rivière, that he write and edit a weekly journal, L’Impressionniste: journal d’art, throughout the four weeks of the third Impressionist group show. Included in Rivière’s publication were two articles by Renoir that Rivière edited. Both articles were signed ‘a painter’ but, clearly, the ideas are Renoir’s: modern architecture is becoming mechanical and unfair to craftsmen, who are better able to do architectural decoration.23
For the 1884 article, Renoir collaborated with Pissarro’s cousin, the lawyer Lionel Nunès, who wrote up Renoir’s idea for a community of workers and artists, ‘The Society of Irregularists’. Its platform suggests exhibiting works in all media derived from a close study of nature. Here Renoir was expanding the idea that a basic characteristic of Impressionist painting was irregularity and that the Impressionists were devoted ‘to the unregimented, the spontaneous, and the natural’.24 Renoir contrasted the nineteenth-century academic art favoured by the yearly government-sponsored Salons with irregularity, unregimented and natural art and crafts. He proposed to unite all the crafts and arts in one society. Their exhibitions would include works by painters, decorators, architects, goldsmiths and embroiderers who based their forms on nature’s irregularity, who avoided repetition and copying, and who executed everything by hand. As with his 1877 writing, Renoir expressed his criticism of modern mechanization that was putting the artisan out of work.
Twenty-seven years later, in 1911, Renoir collaborated with the painter Maurice Denis and again with Georges Rivière, both of whom helped edit his ideas in a preface that ‘is a lament over the loss of the healthy workshop tradition of Cennino Cennini’s era’.25 Renoir’s preface to a new edition of Cennini’s late fourteenth-century Renaissance treatise describes how to make frescoes. Again here, Renoir expresses his dislike of modern mechanization. It is also ‘Renoir’s admiration of the Renaissance workshop tradition [that] implies a recognition of such a hierarchical organization, because he so constantly praised collaboration under the leadership of a master.’26 Even at the end of his life, when he had achieved worldwide fame and his paintings hung in great museums, Renoir continued to consider himself a humble artisan, a craftsman of painting, rather than an artistic genius.27
While Renoir was worshipped during his lifetime, today he is unfairly and inaccurately denigrated and accused of being an anti-Semite and sexist.28 I believe Renoir was neither. These allegations are unfair, though occasionally he did make anti-Semitic remarks. In these cases, Renoir was acting like ninety per cent of the French press and like most men and women during the Dreyfus Affair of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is worth noting that Renoir worked with the prominent Jewish art dealers, the Bernheims, for his 1913 retrospective. I shall have more to say on this in Chapter 4. As noted earlier, in order to stay in the good graces of those on whom he depended, Renoir ingratiated himself with friends whose favour he needed. This led him to express different opinions to different people, including occasional anti-Semitic or anti-feminist comments (without real hatred or sexism behind such comments).
Renoir’s conduct shows that he did not hate Jews. On the contrary, he was close to his Jewish sister-in-law, Blanche Marie Renoir,29 Jewish patrons and Jewish friends, among them the Bernheims, Cahen d’Anvers, Ephrussi, Fould, Halphen, Mendès and Natanson. Indeed, Renoir was the only Impressionist who frequently (fifteen times) exhibited with the Jewish Parisian dealers, the Bernheims, throughout the Dreyfus Affair and afterwards. Nonetheless, Renoir’s wheeler-dealer personality, his manipulativeness, his complex allegiances and the period in which he lived caused him, when with staunchly anti-Semitic friends (including Degas and Julie Manet), occasionally to make prejudiced statements in order to keep their approval. However, Renoir’s behaviour was never anti-Semitic.
Sexism, too, was a cultural phenomenon throughout Renoir’s lifetime. Most French men and women were patriarchal and treated women as second-class citizens. Indeed, throughout centuries of the reign of kings, France never had a ruling queen, even though the king
s often had daughters. Most relevant is France’s sexist attitude towards allowing women’s voice to be heard: France did not allow women to vote until 1944. In contrast, in Great Britain, women over the age of thirty could vote starting in 1918 and, ten years later, younger women had a right to vote equal to men; in the United States, women could vote starting in 1920. At least nineteen other countries allowed women to vote between 1906 and 1942.30
In the context of France’s pervasive sexism, Renoir was generous to women in his professional and personal life. Among all his fellow Impressionists, Renoir forged the closest working relationship with the painter Berthe Morisot. It was a platonic and mutually supportive friendship that transcended both social distinctions and gender, between a cultured upper-class woman and a plebeian artisan-class man. Of their friendship, Morisot’s daughter wrote: ‘M. Mallarmé and M. Renoir were the most intimate friends, the constant visitors on Thursday evenings.’31 Renoir and Morisot worked together and even painted side by side.32 Among all his contemporaries, Renoir was the staunchest defender of Morisot’s art both during her lifetime and after her death. As he wrote to his dealer: ‘exhibit my work with artists like Monet, Sisley, Morisot, etc. and I’m your man, for that’s no longer politics, it’s pure art.’33 At his death, Renoir’s art collection included several works by Morisot.34 Nonetheless, at a time when he was close to Berthe Morisot, he wrote that ‘the woman artist is completely ridiculous’.35 Yet at the same time, he defied the social norms by supporting the career ambitions not only of Morisot but also of his painting student Jeanne Baudot, the singing ambition of Renée Rivière and the possible property ambitions of his secret daughter, Jeanne. Truly, Renoir was complicated.
The Saône River throwing Herself into the Arms of the Rhône River, 1915. 102.2 × 84 cm (40¼ × 33⅛ in.). Matsuoka Museum, Tokyo
Renoir painted the Dance at Bougival (see page 8) when he was forty-two years old and the personification of the Saône river throwing herself into the arms of the Rhône when he was seventy-four. In these and in all of his images throughout sixty years, Renoir was never a sexist; rather, he celebrated women’s beauty and sexuality. Nonetheless, some art critics and scholars accuse Renoir of being sexist because of the sensual ways he portrayed nude women.36 However, in his art and life, there is no evidence that Renoir believed women to be inferior to men. Indeed, he spent sixty years elevating women’s position by celebrating their physical attractiveness and personal value. In this manner, Renoir is the heir to Titian and Rubens, the greatest past artists who celebrated women’s beauty. Yet Renoir went beyond his Renaissance and Baroque forebears by his Impressionist freedom, his warm sensuous palette, his mobile and visible strokes and his open and imprecise forms. It would be just as ludicrous to denounce Titian and Rubens as sexists as to denounce Renoir, since all three of these artists spent their lives searching for ways to make women more beautiful, more powerful and more esteemed. So, with Renoir’s complexity in mind, we now progress to the artist’s life story aided by his words from his extraordinary letters and from those by his friends.
Chapter 1
1841–77
Renoir to age 36;
a Bohemian Leader among the Impressionists;
Model Lise and their Secret Children, Pierre and Jeanne
In November 1861, when he was only twenty, Renoir made one of the most fortuitous decisions he ever took: to study in the Parisian studio of the Swiss painter, Charles Gleyre. A photograph around this time reveals that Renoir was a serious, intense young man. Gleyre’s studio was simply one of many that fed into the École des Beaux-Arts (the government-sponsored art school in Paris), where students learned anatomy and perspective through drawing and painting. The men Renoir met at Gleyre’s would become some of the most important companions of his life. About a year after he arrived, first Alfred Sisley in October, then Frédéric Bazille in November and lastly Claude Monet in December 1862 became fellow students.1 On 31 December 1862, the four were already close friends when they met at Bazille’s home in Paris to celebrate the New Year together.2 Through these friends, Renoir met Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro, studying nearby at the Académie Suisse. These artists would not only become lifelong friends, but would also be of critical importance for Renoir’s artistic development. In his early twenties, Renoir also made the acquaintances of Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Through them, he later met the two women artists, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. By the early 1870s, all of these painters would form the core of the Impressionist movement. Renoir’s charming, gregarious nature allowed him to make friendships despite his lower-class origins. He differed from his new artist friends in that only he came from a lower-class artisan family. The others were from a higher social class, giving them more education and better artistic connections. Bazille, Cassatt, Degas, Manet, Morisot and Sisley were from the upper class, while Cézanne, Monet and Pissarro were from the middle class. When Renoir was around forty, he summarized the origins of his training: ‘Not having rich parents and wanting to be a painter, began by way of crafts: porcelain, faience, blinds, paintings in cafés.’3 Despite his artisan beginnings, Renoir’s more affluent friends saw his lower-class roots as no impediment to his artistic genius. From the beginning of their friendships, when Renoir was short of money to buy paints or food, or needed a place to work or sleep, he was not averse to asking his friends for help, and they were generous, often treating him as if he were a member of their family. It was not only his modest origins that distinguished Renoir, but also his nervous disposition, which was exacerbated by his status as an outsider. Nonetheless, he was beloved and held in high esteem by many. Edmond Maître, an haute-bourgeois friend of Bazille and a friend of the young painter Jacques-Émile Blanche, expressed his astonishment and pleasure that someone from such humble origins and with such anxiety was able to be a man of character and value. Blanche quoted Maître’s description of Renoir aged forty-one: ‘“When Renoir is cheerful, which is rare, and when he feels free, which is just as rare, he speaks very enthusiastically, in a very unpredictable language that is particular to him and does not displease cultured people. In addition, there is within this person such great honesty and such great kindness, that hearing him talk has always done me good. He is full of common sense, on a closer look, yes, common sense and modesty, and in the most innocent and quiet manner, he relentlessly produces his diverse and refined work, which will make future connoisseurs’ heads spin.’”4
Renoir, 1861. Photographer unknown
Renoir’s background was more modest than Maître knew: the painter’s grandfather, born in 1773, during the reign of Louis XV, in Limoges in central France, had been left as a newborn on the steps of the town’s cathedral. That Renoir’s grandfather had been abandoned might explain the artist’s later sympathy towards his own and others’ illegitimate children. His grandfather’s birth certificate reads: ‘The year of our Lord 1773 and on the eighth of the month of January was baptized…an abandoned newborn boy on whom was bestowed the name François.’5 Abandoned children were given the last name of their adoptive family. A Limoges family named Renouard took in the child. Twenty-three years later, when François married, the scribe asked for his last name. At the time of his betrothal in 1796, neither François nor his bride-to-be could read or write. When François said ‘Renouard’, which, in French, is pronounced the same as ‘Renoir’, the scribe wrote ‘Renoir’ and thereby invented the family name, since there were no Renoirs in Limoges previously.6 At the time of his marriage, twenty-two-year-old François was a wooden-shoemaker. His bride, Anne Régnier, three years his senior, came from an artisan family in Limoges: her father was a carpenter and her mother, a seamstress.
François’s eldest child (Renoir’s father), Léonard, was born in Limoges in 1799 during the French Revolution.7 He became a tailor of men’s clothing. When twenty-nine, he married a dressmaker’s assistant, Marguerite Merlet, aged twenty-one, who was born in the rural town of Saintes.8 Her father, Louis, was also a men’s tail
or; her mother had no profession. Renoir’s parents had seven children of whom the first two died in infancy. The artist was the fourth of the surviving five. Renoir and his three elder siblings were born in Limoges. At Renoir’s birth, Pierre-Henri was 9 (born in February 1832), Marie-Elisa (called Lisa, born in February 1833) was 8 and Léonard-Victor (called Victor, born in May 1836) was 4½.9
Pierre-Auguste was known simply as Auguste. His birth certificate states: ‘Today, 25 February 1841, at 3 in the afternoon…Léonard Renoir, 41-year-old tailor, residing on boulevard Sainte-Catherine [today boulevard Gambetta]…presented us with a child of masculine gender who would have the first names Pierre-Auguste, born at his home this morning…to Marguerite Merlet, [Léonard’s] 33-year-old wife.’10 When the artist was born, his parents had been married for thirteen years. Since the family was Catholic, on the day of his birth, Pierre-Auguste was baptized at the church of Saint-Michel-des-Lions.
When Renoir’s paternal grandfather died in May 1845, Renoir’s father moved his family to Paris.11 At this time, many tailors from the provinces were drawn to the French capital whose population was then under a million.12 The family travelled by the only available means of transport, a horse-drawn carriage. They found lodgings near the Louvre museum and the Protestant church, the Temple de l’Oratoire, on rue de la Bibliothèque, now in the first arrondissement.13 Here, when Renoir was eight, his youngest brother, Victor-Edmond (called Edmond), was born in May 1849.
A year prior to Edmond’s birth, when Renoir was seven, and for the next six years, he went to a Catholic school run by the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes (Brothers of Christian Schools). At the same time, Renoir was chosen to sing in Charles-François Gounod’s choir at the church of Saint-Eustache in central Paris (from 1852, Gounod was the conductor of the Orphéon Choral Society in Paris). Despite being in a Catholic school and choir, after his youth, according to his son, ‘Renoir seldom if ever set foot in a church.’14
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