At some time between 1852 and 1855, because of Baron Haussmann’s modernization of Paris, Renoir’s family was evicted from their old apartment.15 Haussmann’s renovations replaced old, narrow, dirty streets and crumbling buildings with wide, tree-lined boulevards with elegant structures and effective city sewers. The Renoirs moved a few blocks away to 23 rue d’Argenteuil in today’s first arrondissement. That apartment’s archives state that a men’s tailor, Léonard ‘Raynouard’, rented rooms on the fifth and sixth floors (America’s sixth and seventh floors). The building was described: ‘There is a store and thirty-three rented apartments for industrial and construction workers of modest means.’16 Renoir’s parents and their five children lived in three small rooms on the fifth floor. Their sixth-floor room was probably used for Léonard’s tailoring business and for Marguerite’s dressmaking.17 The Renoir family stayed at this address until 1868, when Léonard and Marguerite retired to the suburb of Louveciennes. Having Renoir’s childhood home near the Louvre was a happy coincidence, since this great museum had been free and open to the general public at weekends since 1793, and artists could enter any day of the week.
Renoir’s eldest brother, Pierre-Henri, followed the family tradition and became an artisan. He trained to be a medallist and gem engraver under Samuel Daniel, an older Jewish man. Daniel took Pierre-Henri under his wing, introducing the young man to his companion Joséphine Blanche, a seamstress, and to their (illegitimate) daughter Blanche Marie Blanc, who was nine years younger than Pierre-Henri. Daniel was Blanche’s legal guardian (tuter datif), and the family lived at 58 rue Neuve Saint-Augustin. In July 1861, Pierre-Henri and Blanche married, so Renoir had a sister-in-law who was both illegitimate and half-Jewish.18 When Daniel retired in 1879, Pierre-Henri took over his engraving business. By this point, he had become an authority on the engraving of interlaced ornaments and had, in 1863, published a manual of monograms that, four years later, was translated into English as Complete Collection of Figures and Initials.19 Pierre-Henri later wrote and published two other books.20 The painter Renoir’s various attempts at writing for publication in 1877, 1884 and 1911 were modelled on his older brother’s examples.
In 1854 when Renoir was twelve or thirteen, his family’s financial needs required that he leave school and go to work. His parents decided that he should follow Pierre-Henri into an artisan trade; it could well have been that Henri’s employer was friends with to Théodore and Henri Lévy of Entreprise Lévy, who were described as ‘bronze manufacturers’ and ‘painters, decorators, and gilders on porcelain’.21 Since Renoir showed artistic ability and since the family came from Limoges, a city renowned for porcelain, his parents thought he might be good at painting on porcelain vases, plates and cups. As a trade, it was closest to easel painting, so that apprentices became skilled in painting. Such workers could also earn substantially more per day than the 3.6 francs that tailors typically earned.22 Renoir began an apprenticeship at the porcelain-painting workshop of Lévy Frères at 76 rue des Fossés-du-Temple (now rue Amelot, eleventh arrondissement), where he probably worked for four or five years until 1858.23 As an apprentice, Renoir copied rococo images of flowers and figures. At this time, paintings by Watteau, Fragonard and Boucher were popular, some recently having been acquired by the Louvre.24 Renoir saved some of his porcelains, such as ‘two vases decorated with flower bouquets, initialed “AR” with the date 1855’,25 as well as meticulous pencil drawings, such as Birds and Tambourines.26 Renoir also saved a pair of vase-shaped chandeliers with a nude figure on the front and a shield on the reverse, and three related pencil drawings.27 After a few years, when industrialization came to porcelain decoration, Renoir lost his job and began work painting images on window blinds and screens on gauze, calico or oil paper for apartments, shops and steamboats. For two years, he worked for a M. Gilbert at 63 rue du Bac, not far from the École des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank of the Seine.28
While working during the day in this period, Renoir began studying drawing at night at the free municipal drawing school run by the sculptor Louis-Denis Caillouette, the director of the École de Dessin et des Arts Décoratifs, on rue des Petits Carreaux, in today’s second arrondissement.29 Part of the school’s method was to have students copy art from the past. At eighteen, on 24 January 1860, Renoir was granted permission to make copies in pencil or oil of works in the Louvre, both in the galleries and in the drawing collection; this permission was renewed throughout the next five years.30 Renoir treasured some of these early copies (giving some to his nephew Edmond), many of which are classical in style and theme: a detailed pencil drawing of Hector and Paris, a painted copy of Venus and Cupid (both 1860), a drawing of Homer with Shepherds (signed ‘Renoir. January 11, 1861’), and a pencil and black chalk copy of a Bacchanale (signed ‘Renoir. June 15, 1861’).31 Also that year, he painted a copy of Rubens’s The Enthronement of Marie de Medici. Two years later, Renoir also executed a painted copy of Rubens’s Hélène Fourment with her son (see page 81).32 When still an artisan, Renoir’s early fascination with Rubens led him to be nicknamed ‘Monsieur Rubens’, as his younger brother, Edmond, a journalist, explained in an article about Renoir’s experiences in the Lévy porcelain workshop: ‘After a few months of apprenticeship, Renoir was asked to paint on porcelain objects that were usually given to the workers. This gave way to jeers. They [the fellow workers] nicknamed him M. Rubens, as a joke – and he would cry because they were making fun of him.’33 Edmond later owned a gravy boat decorated by Renoir with a copy of Boucher’s Diana at the Bath.34
Aside from copies, Renoir was also painting on his own as early as his late teens. He made a still life of a bouquet of flowers signed and dated ‘June 1858/Renoir’. Another of his early works, done when he was around nineteen, was a portrait of his mother, then aged fifty-three.35 He painted her head looking sideways, wearing a bonnet. Renoir was attached to this painting: it was the only portrait of his parents or siblings that was still in his private collection at the time of his death.
While Renoir was working during the day and taking drawing classes at night, he met Émile-Henri Laporte, an engraving apprentice and later a painter and decorative artist, who was a fellow student at the École de Dessin et des Arts Décoratifs. Laporte preceded Renoir in the painting classes of the Swiss painter, Gleyre, which were free except for 10 francs a month to pay for the model. In November 1861, when Renoir was almost twenty-one years old, his family allowed him to stop paid artisan work in order to pursue his dream of becoming a painter. Renoir followed Laporte’s path, left the drawing class and entered Gleyre’s studio at 69 rue Vaugirard on the Left Bank. While there, he continued to study and copy works at the Louvre; in addition, Gleyre wrote Renoir a letter of recommendation so that he could copy prints at the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale.36 Gleyre prepared students for entrance examinations to the nearby government-sponsored École des Beaux-Arts. In April 1862, five months after Renoir began with Gleyre, even though he was placed poorly (68th out of 80), Renoir was accepted to study at the Beaux-Arts.37 This art school prepared students to submit works to the annual Salon art exhibition held in April.
Interviewed forty years later, Renoir talked about his training: ‘The misunderstanding began as soon as I started studying at the École des Beaux-Arts. I was an extremely hard-working student; I slaved away at academic painting; I studied the classical style, but I never earned the least honorable mention, and my professors were unanimous in finding my painting execrable.’38 Although far from top of his class, his account is somewhat exaggerated: in 1863, he ranked twentieth out of 80 students who took a figure drawing examination at the Beaux-Arts.39 In an interview of 1904, ‘[Renoir] spoke of the advantage that the Impressionists had of being a group of friends who were able to benefit from each other’s research. It is good to work in art classes, because when one always works alone, one ends up believing that everything one does is good. In an art school, one sees what one’s neighbour does. As a result, one benefits f
rom [seeing] what the neighbour did better than you.’40
In the 1860s, the best way for a young artist to make his or her work known to the buying public was to exhibit at the annual state-sponsored Salon. After paintings were accepted by the official jury, they were put on view and evaluated by critics. These reviews were of great importance and affected the prices that artists could ask for their work. Even as late as 1882, Renoir wrote: ‘There are hardly fifteen connoisseurs in Paris capable of liking a painter without the Salon. There are 80,000 of them who won’t even buy a nose [of a portrait] if a painter is not in the Salon.’41 Hence, Renoir diligently submitted his paintings to the Salons of 1863 through 1890, with varying levels of success.42 Even when accepted, his paintings were usually placed where they were hard to see. In the same 1904 interview, Renoir was asked why he did not exhibit at the Salons: ‘It’s a very big mistake…to think that I am against exhibitions. On the contrary, no one is more of a supporter of them, because in my opinion, painting is meant to be shown. Now, if you are astonished that you didn’t see my canvases in the Salon exhibitions and if you wanted to find out why, it’s much simpler than that. My paintings were refused. The jury generally welcomed them – welcomed them, that’s one way of saying it – with a burst of laughter. And when these gentlemen one day found themselves by chance in a somewhat less hilarious mood, they decided to accept one, and my poor canvas was put under the moulding or under the awning, so that it would go as unnoticed as possible. I think I’ve been sending in canvases for about twenty years; about ten times I was mercilessly refused; the other ten times [about] one out of three was taken, and hung just as I told you.… All these refusals, or bad placements, didn’t help sell my paintings, and I had to earn enough to eat, which was hard.’43 Renoir was exaggerating a little. In truth, he had submitted works to the official Salon over the course of twenty-seven years from 1863 until 1890. His paintings were refused four times and accepted ten. Even though he had some success with the Salons for a few years, they never were an ideal exhibition space for his works.
Gleyre’s studio closed in the spring of 1864 because of his health problems. At the same time, Renoir was placed tenth among 106 applicants for continuing study at the École des Beaux-Arts. By the time he left Gleyre’s studio, he was already following the Realist painter Édouard Manet, nine years older than he. Manet, who was the same age as Renoir’s brother Pierre-Henri, became somewhat like an older brother to Renoir, a role model and a supporter.44 He had been inspired by the previous generation of Realists (Courbet, Corot and others). Manet’s two ground-breaking 1863 paintings, made when Renoir was still with Gleyre, were Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (exhibited at the Salon des Refusés of 1863) and Olympia (exhibited at the Salon of 1865). They caused a furore among the conservative establishment in Paris but endeared Manet to Renoir and his friends. These two paintings displayed modern themes in a modern style, yet also referred to well-known paintings in museums: the Déjeuner recalls Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert in the Louvre and Olympia recalls Titian’s Venus of Urbino in the Uffizi, Florence. Renoir adopted Manet’s goal: to paint modern life in a modern style, yet to be an heir to the great artists of the past. Some of Renoir’s early paintings, such as The Inn of Mother Anthony (1866; see page 84) and Lise and Sisley (1868; see page 85), show that he was evolving his own Realistic style, yet was indebted to Manet.
Renoir and his friends socialized with Manet each Friday evening at 5.30 at the Café de Bade in the centre of Paris. In 1866, Manet changed to the Café Guerbois at 11 Grande rue des Batignolles (now avenue de Clichy) in north-west Paris, an area called the Batignolles. After 1876, they again moved their meeting place, this time to the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes on place Pigalle. The wealthy, highly educated Manet was both the intellectual leader and the oldest of the group later referred to as the Impressionists. Other future Impressionists who came to the café meetings included Bazille, Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. The only two core Impressionists who did not attend the café meetings were Morisot and Cassatt, because attending café meetings was not socially acceptable for high-class women. Non-artists who came included Bazille’s close friend Maître, who was a rich dilettante painter and musician, the photographer Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who went under the name Nadar, and the writer and critic Émile Zola, as well as other critics, writers and collectors; even though they were not painters, they came to be associated with this modern art movement.
Among all the younger artists who followed him, Manet considered Renoir his successor and Renoir considered Manet his mentor. This was evident in 1869, when Henri Fantin-Latour painted a large work entitled A Studio of the Batignolles Quarter, destined for the Salon of 1870, which shows Manet seated, painting at his easel, surrounded by artist and writer friends.45 They include, from left to right, Otto Scholderer, Renoir, Zacharie Astruc, Zola, Maître, Bazille and Monet. For this work, Manet had asked Fantin to place Renoir nearest to him. Not only did Fantin comply, but he also surrounded Renoir’s head in a gold frame, almost a halo. Renoir stands with bowed head, suggesting his sensitivity and deference. Despite his humble roots, at age twenty-nine, Renoir had not just become friends with the most innovative artists and writers but was seen as their leader’s heir. Throughout Manet’s lifetime, he continued to be friendly and encouraging to Renoir, who always esteemed and revered him. Renoir’s gratefulness to Manet lasted well beyond the latter’s death in 1883; it extended through Renoir’s close friendship with Manet’s brother and sister-in-law, Eugène Manet and Berthe Morisot, and their daughter, Julie Manet.
Like that of Renoir and his friends, Manet’s work was disdained at the annual Salons. Similarly, when Renoir was painting in a Realist style akin to Manet’s at that time, his art received negative reviews from most critics. However, some, like Zola, who were favourable to Manet, also viewed Renoir’s work in a positive light. When Renoir exhibited Girl with the Umbrella at the Salon of 1868, Zola wrote a review about the modernists.46 Other critics noted Renoir’s debt to Manet.47
Although considered the elder statesman of the Impressionists, Manet refused to exhibit with them in their group shows. His conservative views led him to believe that the official Salons were the only way to reach the public and critics. Nonetheless, he tried to help their exhibits, as in 1877, when he wrote to the foremost art critic, Albert Wolff: ‘You may not care for this kind of painting yet, but some day you will. Meanwhile it would be nice of you to say something about it in Le Figaro.’48
In the 1870s, the liberal young Impressionists rejected the government Salon exhibitions and official recognition, such as the Légion d’Honneur. Even though Manet was artistically innovative and a leader of the Impressionists, he felt it important to go along with certain conservative trends and refused to exhibit with the Impressionists, instead submitting his works to the official Salons. Later, he accepted the official recognition of the Légion d’Honneur. Even though Renoir was part of the anti-establishment Impressionist group, he differed from his peers and applauded Manet’s conservative realism. In 1881, when Manet finally was awarded the Légion d’Honneur and was dying of syphilis of the spinal cord, Renoir, then on a trip, congratulated him: ‘On my return to the capital, I will salute you as the painter who is loved by everybody and is officially recognized…. You are the joyous fighter, without hate for anyone, like an old Gaul, and I admire you because of this happiness even in times of injustice.’49 Manet immediately wrote back: ‘You will without a doubt bring us back a mass of works all personal and interesting…. A thousand kind regards, my dear Renoir, and bring back a lot of canvases.’50 Manet, no doubt, appreciated Renoir’s understanding of why he would accept the Légion despite its conservative connotations.
Although Manet esteemed Renoir as a talented artist, the critics and buying public did not, so he had financial problems on and off until he was fifty years old. In his twenties, Renoir was helped by several of his affluent artist friends. Because of his charm and warmth, his wealth
y friends introduced him to their families. His friends assisted him by providing studio space, living quarters and money to paint; sometimes they found him commissions for portraits and mural decorations. Indeed, he became financially dependent on many friends but none of them seemed to mind.
Since his parents’ apartment had only three rooms for seven adults, Renoir was happy to turn to friends’ studios and apartments for the space to paint and store his canvases and to live. Despite the fact that Renoir’s parents lived in Paris until 1868 when he was twenty-seven, from 1862 Renoir consistently gave friends’ addresses as his own when he exhibited his art. At the Beaux-Arts, Renoir gave his address as 29 place Dauphine on the Île de la Cité, which was the home of his friend Laporte. Throughout the next eight years, on different occasions, Renoir recorded that he lived with various wealthy artist friends – Bazille, Le Coeur, Maître and Sisley. These colleagues recognized Renoir’s genius and had no problem allowing him to reside and work with them at the same time that they gave him financial help.
Renoir’s wealthy friends were also happy to find him portrait commissions. While Renoir preferred to paint daily life, as did Manet, since such works were hard to sell, Renoir did what he considered second-best; he became a portraitist. Even though photographic portraits were coming into fashion, painted portraits were still popular. Nonetheless, they were always problematic since the artist had to please the sitter. From 1864 and for the next twenty years, portraiture dominated his oeuvre. Of his 397 figure paintings, 164 are portraits compared to 161 daily life images, 28 nudes and 9 decorations.51 The year that Gleyre’s studio closed, 1864, Renoir made portraits of Laporte and his sister, Marie-Zélie Laporte.52 He also painted portraits of Sisley and of his father, William Sisley.53 In these portraits, as in many of his commissioned portraits from 1864 until 1870, Renoir painted in a traditional, realistic style. Indeed, his William Sisley closely resembles a photograph that could have served as its model.54 He submitted this portrait to the Salon of 1865 where it was exhibited as Portrait of M.W.S.
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