Sisley and Renoir also worked together on landscape painting in the Fontainebleau area, then accessible by train, 56 kilometres (35 miles) south-east of Paris. Much later, in 1897, Renoir told a friend: ‘When I was young, I used to go to Fontainebleau with Sisley with my paint box and a painter’s shirt. We would walk until we found a village, and sometimes only come back a week later when we had run out of money.’55 In the 1860s, Sisley’s family was welcoming to Renoir, who occasionally slept at their home, at 31 avenue de Neuilly, Porte Maillot.56
Besides being helped by Laporte and Sisley, Renoir turned increasingly to Bazille, who was from a wealthy Montpellier family. Around 1864, when Bazille had a studio at rue de Vaugirard, he wrote to his parents: ‘I am hosting one of my friends, a former student of Gleyre, who does not have an art studio at the moment. Renoir, that is his name, is very hard working. He uses my models, and even helps me to pay for them, partly. It is quite agreeable for me not to spend my days entirely alone.’57 Bazille’s father later remarked on their ‘brotherly friendship’,58 evident when Renoir wrote to Bazille: ‘Kiss your mother and father for me. Send my best wishes to the whole family, your cousins, to that special aunt we love to talk about, to your sister-in-law and the little one; I like him a lot – there’s a child who’ll go far. Watch out for the carriages!… Your friend, A. Renoir.’59 On and off for six years beginning when Renoir was twenty-three, he lived with Bazille in his friend’s succession of Parisian apartments that also functioned as studios. From July 1866 through December 1867, Bazille and Renoir lived and worked at 20 rue Visconti on the Left Bank. From January 1868 until the spring of 1870, they lived at 9 rue de la Paix (now 7 rue de La Condamine) in the Batignolles quarter, west of Montmartre, not far from Manet’s meeting place, the Café Guerbois. From April 1870, for a few months, Renoir and Bazille returned to the Left Bank and lived at 8 rue des Beaux-Arts. Since this last apartment was tiny, Renoir sometimes (as in the summer of 1870) stayed with Bazille’s friend, Maître, who lived nearby at 5 rue Taranne (now the boulevard Saint-Germain).
Bazille not only helped Renoir with living accommodation but was also supportive of Renoir’s art. During the time of the May 1867 Salon, when Renoir exhibited Lise with an Umbrella,60 Bazille explained to his parents: ‘My friend Renoir did an excellent painting which stunned everyone. I hope he will be successful at the exhibition, he really needs it.’61
A few months later, in November or December 1867, Renoir and Bazille painted portraits of one another in their rue Visconti studio (see pages 82 and 83). In addition to supporting Renoir, Bazille occasionally also helped Monet. A few months before the portrait exchange, Bazille wrote to his parents: ‘Monet… will sleep at my place until the end of the month. Therefore, including Renoir, I am lodging two needy painters. It is a veritable infirmary, and I am very pleased about it. I have enough room, and they are both very cheerful.’62 While he was financially supporting both Renoir and Monet, those two artists developed a friendship that lasted for fifty-seven years. When seventy-one years old, in an interview, Renoir said: ‘One is of one’s time, in spite of oneself. Ask me about Manet, Monet, Degas and Cézanne, and I can give you clearly formed opinions, since I lived, worked, and struggled with them.’63 In his old age, Monet felt similarly. A month after Renoir’s death, Monet was interviewed and talked about ‘our early years of struggle and hope’.64 Their careers had similar trajectories. Both endured public hostility for almost thirty years before enjoying enormous fame and fortune.
Besides the value to his work, Renoir later said how he benefited from Monet’s toughness during the days of the critics’ and public’s ridicule of the Impressionist style. When an old man, Renoir told his friend Albert André: ‘I have always given in to my destiny, I never had the temperament of a fighter and I would many times have given up altogether, if my old friend Monet, who did have the temperament of a fighter, hadn’t given me a hand and lifted me back up.’65 Although Renoir was never as openly outspoken as Monet, he capitalized on his friend’s assertiveness and would be inspired by that courage throughout his life. Renoir often claimed to be passive, timid or shy, but his letters and actions reveal that he rarely was.
Monet and Renoir were thus allied in the late 1860s for artistic and personal reasons and also because both turned to Bazille for financial help.66 At the time, Monet’s needs were even more dire than were Renoir’s. In 1867, Monet’s model and mistress, Camille, bore his son, Jean (the couple later married). Monet’s grocer father, then a widower, refused to help because his own mistress had just had a child. Then Monet’s monetary problems became worse from July through September 1869. During that period, Renoir was penniless and staying with his parents in Louveciennes, which is near Saint-Michel, a hamlet near Bougival where Monet was living with Camille and the infant Jean. Renoir travelled almost daily to visit Monet. In fact, he so often slept at Monet’s home that, a few years later, Monet wrote to Pissarro, ‘Renoir is not here so you will be able to sleep here.’67 In a series of letters to Bazille, each man wrote of his poverty and of their work together. On 9 August 1869, Monet wrote to Bazille: ‘Renoir brought us bread from his [parents’] house so that we wouldn’t starve to death.’68 Renoir confirmed this in a letter to Bazille from Louveciennes: ‘I am at my parents’ house and almost always at Monet’s…. We don’t eat every day. But, all the same, I am pleased because as far as painting goes, Monet is good company. I am doing next to nothing because I have very little paint. Things may get better this month. If it’s the case, I’ll let you know.’69 Things did get better, since the next month, Renoir and Monet painted together at La Grenouillère (also known as Croissy-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris).
In late September 1869, when both of them were benefiting from Bazille’s support, Renoir and Monet created the first truly Impressionist paintings to have survived, at La Grenouillère.70 (Pissarro also invented Impressionism around this time, but his canvases of 1869 were destroyed during the Franco-Prussian War.) Monet wrote to Bazille: ‘Renoir, who has spent the last two months here, also wants to do this painting [La Grenouillère].’71 Hence it was together that they developed this new style for landscapes with small figures. Working outdoors, each artist made five paintings in which he employed characteristics now defined as Impressionist: vibrant and varied hues as well as pervasive light tones; high-keyed shades used as reflected hues in the shadows; a seemingly random composition with figures moving beyond the frame; primary importance given to tiny, moving, brightly coloured strokes that suggest indistinct forms; blurred details; dissolved edges and lines; and eroded mass. Beyond the five pairs of paintings at La Grenouillère, through 1873, side by side, Renoir and Monet created fourteen paintings of identical landscapes or still lifes. Renoir also painted eleven portraits of Monet (see page 82) and Camille.72
Despite the help of Bazille, Renoir continued to be plagued by a lack of money and needed to seek further support from other wealthy friends. Two years after Renoir met Bazille, Monet and Sisley at Gleyre’s studio, he made the acquaintance of Jules Le Coeur, who, like Manet and Pierre-Henri Renoir, was nine years older than he.73 Jules came from a wealthy Parisian family that created furniture for the courts of Europe. The two men had reasons to be drawn to one another. Renoir, lacking wealth and connections, gravitated towards Jules, one of the more generous and friendly among the upper-class students. Jules, coming from an architecture background, admired Renoir for his greater experience in drawing and painting. Later, Renoir and Le Coeur became extremely close because of their clandestine affairs with two sisters.
Whereas Renoir’s previous intimate relationships remain unknown, Jules had been married. At that time, both he and his older brother, Charles, were successful architects, having decided not to join their father’s company. Jules married on 4 May 1861. Eighteen months later, two tragedies befell him. Within a fortnight of giving birth to their son on 3 November 1862, Le Coeur’s wife and son both died.74 Le Coeur was devastated and left Paris; he travelled around Europe
and came to the conclusion that he no longer wanted to be an architect. On 24 August 1863, in a letter to his mother, he expressed his desire to become a painter.75 With her approval, at age thirty-two, he entered Gleyre’s studio where one of his cousins studied.76 There, in early 1864, he met Renoir and his friends.
Le Coeur and Renoir became close companions. When Gleyre’s studio closed later that same year, Jules and his family helped Renoir by commissioning portraits and ceiling frescoes and by purchasing paintings. In addition, Jules, like Bazille, supported Renoir and invited him to paint in his studio and to live with him at his various residences in Paris, Marlotte and Ville d’Avray. Hence, throughout his twenties, Renoir stayed at times with Le Coeur and at other times with Bazille. Jules introduced Renoir to his family, who lived in a large compound at rue Alexandre de Humboldt (now rue Jean-Dolent) in the nineteenth arrondissement in north-east Paris. Except for Jules, everyone, including his mother Félicie, his brother, Charles, and two sisters, Louise and Marie, with their spouses and children, resided in the family compound, which included their family home and business complex. Jules’s father, Joseph Le Coeur, had died in 1857. At that time, Jules’s eldest sister, Louise, then aged twenty-nine, who never married, began to help her mother run the family enterprise. This business, which became in 1861 Le Coeur et Compagnie, flourished, employed hundreds of workers and became one of the most important carpentry and cabinetmaking operations in Paris; they even participated in the renovations of the Louvre.77
The first evidence that Renoir knew Jules’s family is revealed in a letter from Jules’s youngest sister, Marie, in the spring of 1865, to her husband, Fernand Fouqué, a distinguished mineralogist and geologist: ‘Jules leaves tomorrow to spend a few days at Mr Brunet’s house, near Fontainebleau. Mr Renoir is also going away to the countryside.’78 At that time, Renoir, Sisley and other painter friends accepted Le Coeur’s hospitality at Marlotte, almost 75 kilometres (47 miles) south-east of Paris, where Jules rented a house on the rue de la Cheminée Blanche (today, 30 rue Delort).79 Renoir occasionally brought along his brother Edmond, then a young journalist and writer aged seventeen, whom Renoir later helped to get employment as a secretary for the Le Coeur business.
Beginning in 1866 and for the next eight years, Renoir painted many works for the Le Coeur family. Jules’s sister Marie described Renoir’s working habits: ‘That poor boy is like a body without a soul when he is not working.’80 Her observation was in fact true; for the next fifty-three years until his death, Renoir was obsessed with his art and painted every day unless physically incapacitated. The Le Coeurs acquired three Renoir still lifes: Spring Bouquet that he signed ‘A. Renoir. 1866’ and, the same year, Flowers in a Vase. Two years later, he made Basket and Partridge for Charles Le Coeur. The family also bought Renoir’s figure paintings such as Lise holding Wildflowers.
However, most of the paintings that the Le Coeurs bought from Renoir were portraits. The first, in April 1866, was of the family matriarch, Mme Félicie Le Coeur.81 When she hired Renoir to paint her, Marie informed her husband. Shortly thereafter he wrote dismissively to his mother-in-law: ‘I learned with great pleasure that you are getting your portrait done, but I must confess I would much rather see it painted by any other person than by Renoir. I have little confidence in that young man’s talent; to me, his personality and his behaviour are as unpleasant as possible. I am afraid that the impression I have of the artist will be reflected in the portrait.’82 These insults were probably based on Renoir’s lower-class origins, which still raised eyebrows among those who had not been charmed by the artist’s personality.
In the spring of 1866, Renoir was still working on his portrait of Jules’s mother at the same time that he was waiting to hear whether his two submissions to the Salon of 1866 had been accepted. Renoir had promised to write telling Jules the news. When Jules heard nothing he became frustrated at Renoir and wrote to his mother: ‘Renoir, this animal, left on Monday and told me that he would write to me as soon as he knew. I think that he has not written yet because he does not know anything. However, he could have at least written that he did not know rather than make me think that he has bad news for me.’83 Jules disparages Renoir by calling him an ‘animal’, even though he admits that Renoir probably did not yet know about the jury’s decision. That same year, besides completing the portrait of Mme Le Coeur, Renoir painted Jules and his dogs in Fontainebleau forest, more a landscape than a portrait.84
Two years later, in 1868, Renoir proposed to Jules’s brother Charles to paint his wife and son, Joseph, in their garden, and he drew a sketch and posted it to Charles.85 This work was never completed, yet, around the same time, Renoir made a little oil study of Joseph’s head. In 1869, Renoir painted a portrait of Charles’s mother-in-law, Mme Théodore Charpentier. The following year, Renoir made portraits of Charles and of his wife. After the Franco-Prussian War, Renoir continued to make portraits of the family: of Charles’s eldest daughter, Marie, aged twelve, and of his next daughter, Marthe, aged nine, and another head of Joseph. In 1874, Renoir painted a bust as well as a full-length portrait of Charles; the latter shows him standing outdoors.86
Besides portraits and purchases, Charles helped Renoir to fulfil an early dream: to paint indoor murals to complement architecture. Charles and Jules were childhood friends of the Romanian Prince Georges Bibesco (1834–1902), who came to Paris as a boy. Bibesco studied at the French military academy, became an officer and was part of the French Mexican and Algerian campaigns. In 1867 or 1868, Charles was working on plans for a town house for Bibesco in Paris’s seventh arrondissement at 22 boulevard de La Tour-Maubourg. Charles helped Renoir get a commission for two ceiling decorations in that house. In the spring of 1868, Renoir made two preparatory watercolours for the ceiling, one in the style of Fragonard and one in that of Tiepolo.87 He also painted the Bibesco family crest above the fireplace in the Salle d’Armes (Armour Room).88 The first stone of Hôtel Bibesco was laid on 23 April 1869. Construction was interrupted by the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, but was completed soon thereafter; Renoir completed his murals by the end of summer 1871.89 Unfortunately, the house was torn down in the 1910s and Renoir’s frescoes were destroyed.
Aside from working on his art, Renoir spent much time with Jules. Beginning in the spring of 1865, Renoir lived intermittently with his friend in his Paris apartment at 43 avenue d’Eylau (now avenue Victor Hugo), in north-west Paris in the sixteenth arrondissement. When Renoir was first accepted at the Salon of 1865, in the booklet of participants he gave Jules’s address as his own.90 In the spring of 1866, while Renoir was in Paris painting the portrait of Mme Le Coeur, Jules invited him to accompany him to Marlotte (where Sisley had preceded them). Renoir could not decide whether to finish his painting in Paris or to go with his friends. Le Coeur’s sister Marie wrote a letter describing Renoir’s indecisiveness and impulsiveness: ‘Yesterday morning, he finally came to work [on her mother’s portrait] saying that he had decided not to leave [for Marlotte]. This morning he was still resolved to stay but he accompanied Jules to the railroad and at the last moment left with Jules to Marlotte. He does not have any suitcase, and will therefore be forced to return to get his things.’91
It was in Marlotte a few months later that Renoir created his first large group portrait that is also his first scene of daily life: The Inn of Mother Anthony, Marlotte (see page 84) portrays his friends after a meal: Jules Le Coeur is the standing bearded man rolling a cigarette.92 One of his dogs, Toto, a bichon, appears in the foreground.93 Sisley is on the right, wearing a hat and reading the newspaper, L’Événement, in which Zola had written favourably about Renoir’s friends Monet and Manet. The facing beardless man has not been identified. Framing the trio of men is the waitress, Nana, at the left, and the proprietress, Mother Anthony, at rear right. The fresco on the back wall is Renoir’s caricature of Henri Murger, the author of Scènes de la vie de Bohème, which later gave Puccini the theme for his opera depicting a bohemian lifestyle somewhat para
llel to Renoir’s. The bohemian movement in Paris was active at the time, beginning in the 1840s and continuing into the late 1860s. It was a glorification of free spirits, artistry and romanticism, a counter-cultural way of life that Renoir alludes to in the Murger caricature.
After Jules and Renoir had been friends for a while, and while they were spending time in Marlotte, Jules introduced Renoir to a model, Lise Tréhot, who would be the most important woman in Renoir’s life from 1866 through 1872. Jules had met Lise soon after entering Gleyre’s studio when he renewed contact with one of his former architect friends, Mathieu Tréhot, who introduced Jules to his two sisters.94 In 1866, Clémence was twenty-three and Lise was eighteen. Their father, Louis Tréhot, ran a tobacco and wineshop at 71 avenue des Ternes in north-west Paris in the seventeenth arrondissement, and the family lived nearby. By 1866, Clémence had become Jules’s mistress. Jules asked Renoir to paint her portrait. That same year, Renoir made a watercolour of Jules and Clémence, The Stolen Kiss.95
Lise Tréhot started modelling for Renoir in 1866 when she posed for three half-length paintings: Lise Sewing, Portrait of Lise and Woman with a Bird.96 Throughout the next seven years, Lise was Renoir’s only model. She posed for all his paintings destined for the yearly Salons: the nude, Diana as a Huntress, 1867; Lise (Woman with an Umbrella), 1867; The Bohemian, 1868; Algerian Odalisque, 1870; Bather with Griffon, 1870; and Parisians dressed as Algerians, 1872.97 Of these, the first and the last submissions were rejected, but the other four were accepted at the spring Salon.
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