Renoir

by Barbara Ehrlich White

  At this time, Renoir was in close contact with his family, painting several portraits of them, but never admitting to Lise and their children, as noted.137 During 1869, in between the births of Pierre and Jeanne, Renoir had painted a stern half-length portrait of his father, Léonard.138 Léonard, recently retired from tailoring, and his wife lived in a house with a garden in Louveciennes (near, as noted earlier, both Jules at Ville-d’Avray and Monet at Saint-Michel near Bougival). Renoir’s father died there on 22 December 1874, and his mother continued to live in that house with her daughter and son-in-law. In 1870, when Jeanne was born, Renoir completed a pair of elegant portraits of his oldest brother Pierre-Henri and his wife, Blanche.139

  It is not clear when Renoir began his military service in the ten-month Franco-Prussian War. However, on 26 August 1870, when he was twenty-nine, he reported to Libourne, 575 kilometres (some 360 miles) south-west of Paris, and was given an official record book that gives an account of his military training, which had begun eight years earlier with obligatory reserve duty, when he served first for three months in 1862 and then for another three in 1864.140 Four years later, he again underwent further military training, which ended on 31 December 1868, almost two years before he was summoned to duty.

  Even though photography had been invented in 1839, Renoir’s record book includes only a description of his appearance. He was relatively short – ‘1 metre 69 [5 ft 6½]’ – and was described as ‘face: oval; forehead: average; eyes: brown; nose: long; mouth: big; chin: round; hair and eyebrows: blond.’ Two months after he arrived in Libourne, he received a letter that specified his military assignment: ‘M. Renoir, 10th Light Cavalry Regiment and 4th Platoon.’141 This was a unit trained in rapid movements on horseback.

  Two weeks before Renoir was called to serve in the cavalry, Bazille had volunteered in a Zouave regiment, a dangerous, elite infantry corps. Since Bazille was from a rich family, if drafted he could have paid for someone to fight in his place. That Bazille chose not just to serve but in a dangerous unit is evidence of his selflessness and courage. However, his decision upset and angered his friends. When Maître learned of the enlistment, he wrote an imploring, emotional letter to Bazille: ‘My dear and only friend, I’ve just received your letter; you are mad, stark raving mad. I embrace you with all of my heart. May God protect you, you and my poor brother! Ever yours. E. Maître. Why not consult a friend? You have no right to go ahead with this enlistment. Renoir has just come in. I’m giving him my pen. E. Good luck you crazy brute! Renoir.’142

  Renoir clearly was angry that Bazille was intentionally risking his life out of patriotism without concern for the feelings of his friends. Renoir’s and Maître’s fears were justified. On 28 November 1870, Bazille – a great talent and a generous human being – was killed at Beaune-la-Rolande. Maître was heart-broken and wrote to his own father: ‘Half of myself has gone away…. No one in the world will ever fill the void that he has left in my life.’143 Renoir was greatly saddened by Bazille’s death, as Bazille’s father recalled: ‘Renoir did not write to me, but friends of his told me of his emotion and deep sorrow, which don’t surprise me, because I knew about the brotherly friendship he felt for Frédéric.’144 Bazille’s father was also devastated and decided that he wanted to own Renoir’s portrait of his son, then in Manet’s collection. Initially, Manet did not want to part with it but was eventually persuaded by the grief of Bazille’s father, who offered a painting by Monet in exchange (see page 83).145

  Among other artists, both Degas and Manet volunteered to serve in the National Guard, Degas to man a cannon, Manet to became a lieutenant.146 Other artist friends avoided conscription. Cézanne hid in the small fishing village of L’Estaque, west of Marseilles.147 Monet and Pissarro fled to London, where they met the paintings dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel. Sisley, who was British, was not drafted.

  Renoir was drafted but does not seem to have taken part in combat. Five months after he joined the cavalry, he became gravely ill and was granted leave to convalesce. Writing from his uncle’s home, Renoir explained to Charles Le Coeur: ‘Finally, I got a bad case of dysentery and I would have kicked the bucket had it not been for my uncle who came and got me in Libourne and took me to Bordeaux.’148 On 10 March 1871, he was discharged from military duties. Although the French had surrendered, much of the populace objected to France’s defeat. Their anger manifested itself in the Commune, the Paris civil war of April 1871. During this time, Paris was a city devastated by cannon fire and bombings.

  The Franco-Prussian War officially ended on 10 May 1871, when the Treaty of Frankfurt was signed. It was a decisive Prussian victory that led the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck to unite the German states under his rule. That same year, Napoleon III’s Second Empire ended and the French Third Republic began. The losses of the French forces were enormous – 138,871 dead and 143,000 wounded – compared to the Prussian losses of 28,208 dead and 88,488 wounded.149 France agreed to pay Prussia, soon to become Germany, five billion francs in war indemnity. The country was humiliated by additional punitive measures when it lost its north-eastern part: most of Alsace and the north-eastern part of Lorraine.

  When Renoir returned to Paris in late March 1871, he sought out his old friend Maître, since both of them were mourning Bazille’s death. Whereas before the war Renoir had lived with rich artist friends, after the war he rented his own place near Maître’s. First, he rented a room on the rue du Dragon in today’s sixth arrondissement. A few months later, he found an apartment studio close by at 34 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs.150 Being able to afford his own apartment and studio marked an improvement over his dependent living arrangements before the war.

  In Paris in April 1871 the Council of the Commune had established compulsory military service for men aged between eighteen and forty years old. If caught, both Renoir and Maître would have had to participate. Since neither is on record as having served during this time, doubtless both men were hiding. Maître wrote to his father in June 1871 that the area where he and Renoir lived had ‘streets in ruins with corpses all around’.151

  Nonetheless, perhaps to counter this sorry state, Renoir continued developing the Impressionist style that was optimistic and gave the message that life in France was good. Certainly, his positive art was an antidote to the general despair all around him. Soon after his return to Paris, Renoir portrayed Maître reclining on a sofa. Maître’s partner, Rapha, whom he had painted once before the war, he painted twice, one a bust portrait, the other a large full-length painting signed ‘A. Renoir. April. 1871.’152 It was extremely unusual for Renoir to include the month and year with his signature. However, this particular month would have called to mind the Commune since, according to the Goncourt brothers’ journal entry of 2 April, that month marked the beginning of Paris’s civil war.153

  This large portrait shows Rapha fashionably dressed in a style then advertised in the fashion magazines. Beyond the modernity in the fashion, having her hold a Japanese fan calls attention to the contemporary taste in things Oriental. Rapha stands in a room full of bright flowers with a birdcage nearby.154 That Renoir painted a joyful portrait during the devastation of a civil war was characteristic in that he created happiness for himself. His paintings never reflect his problems or those of the world.

  In addition to contacting Maître, Renoir also resumed his relationship with Lise, who started modelling again in 1871. At this time Renoir was thirty and Lise twenty-three. It is probable that she was worried about being able to find a financially successful husband so that she and their future children could have a comfortable life. Presumably, after seven years with Renoir, she concluded that he would never be able to support her. When, in 1872, she was introduced to her brother’s wealthy architect friend, Georges Brière de l’Isle, she terminated her relationship with Renoir and began a new one with Brière de l’Isle.

  Even in Renoir’s later life, he continued to keep his relationship with Lise a secret. Forty years later, when the painter was se
venty-one, in a letter to his dealer, he said of some works for which Lise had modelled: ‘I lost contact with the model who posed for the painting.’155

  Before Lise left him, in 1872 Renoir painted his most poignant portrait, Lise in a White Shawl (see page 87).156 It was a generous last work that expresses Renoir’s deep sadness at Lise’s departure. Her eyes and gesture manifest the closure of their relationship. When she left, Renoir gave her both this last portrait as well as the first portrait he had made of her, six years earlier.157 She kept both portraits until her death. If Lise had any letters from the artist, we will never know, since she destroyed all her personal papers.158

  Even though Lise had left Renoir in the spring of 1872 for the rich Brière de l’Isle, it would be eleven years before they married (on 21 June 1883). In the intervening time, she bore him three children: Jacques in December 1873, Marianne in August 1875 and Benjamin in January 1879. All three were recognized by Brière de l’Isle and were given his last name. Just like her older sister Clémence, Lise had waited ten years before she recognized her children; however, the great difference between Lise’s relationship and Clémence’s was that Clémence never became Mme Jules Le Coeur. Lise’s recognition of her children coincided with her marriage to Brière de l’Isle. Two years after they wed, the couple had a fourth child, Catherine, who was born in January 1885.159 The Brières lived in a chic neighbourhood in the sixteenth arrondissement, at 61 avenue du Trocadéro. Lise’s husband and children knew she had modelled for Renoir but she never told them about her children with him. It is likely that Lise never contacted her daughter by Renoir, since Jeanne saved many letters from the artist but none from Lise.

  Just as Renoir had reconnected with Maître and Lise after his return from the war, so he renewed his friendship with Jules Le Coeur and his family. In June and July 1871, under the direction of Charles Le Coeur, Renoir continued work on the Bibesco ceiling paintings and finished them in the summer of 1871.160 Two years later, during the summer of 1874, Renoir’s ten-year relationship with the Le Coeurs ended suddenly, including his close friendship with Jules. At the time, Renoir and Jules were staying with Charles and his family at their summer house near Paris at Fontenay-aux-Roses. There, Renoir was painting portraits of the family, including one of Charles’s mother-in-law, Mme Théodore Charpentier, and one of Charles, then aged forty-four.161

  Something happened between Renoir and Charles’s eldest daughter, Marie, then aged fifteen, that led to Renoir’s banishment from the family. This was the same young girl whose portrait Renoir had painted a few years earlier. One account of what happened was written by Marie herself decades later when she was a grandmother and wrote a notebook of childhood memories. She recalled that one evening, her father had come upon Renoir looking through a keyhole at her and her two cousins who were dancing by candlelight in their slips.162 The other explanation of what happened was related by Marie’s younger sister, Martha, who wrote that Jules had found a blotter with ink writing in reverse; he held the blotter up to a mirror and saw that Renoir had written a letter to Marie. The implication is that Renoir initiated a meeting with Marie that the family suspected could have been intimate in nature. Jules was horrified that Renoir seemed to have propositioned his niece. Knowing that Renoir had fathered two children with Lise, Jules feared what might transpire with Marie. He felt that Renoir’s behaviour was sufficient grounds to sever their long friendship, which ended in 1874. A year later, a letter from a Le Coeur cousin indicates that the family had not forgiven Renoir: ‘About the faux-pas, you remember Fontenay-aux-Roses and your dear niece Marie [who had to deal] with a man without any principles whatsoever when it comes to morals and decency.’163

  If the letter story is true, Renoir’s inappropriate behaviour towards Marie probably offended Jules, who had long considered Renoir his close friend, someone with whom secrets had been shared. Renoir would have broken Jules’s trust and, perhaps, Jules feared that his own clandestine relationship with Clémence would be revealed to his family. In addition to that, Jules’s reaction might recall his brother-in-law’s objection eight years earlier that Renoir was too low-class to be associating with the upper-class Le Coeurs. It is unclear whether Jules would have reacted the same way if Renoir had come from a wealthy, established family. While the facts are unclear, we do know that Renoir’s ten-year friendship with Jules abruptly ended. From that time on, Renoir made no more paintings for the Le Coeurs. He is not mentioned in family letters or in Jules’s correspondence. Nonetheless, before this rupture, Jules had acquired at least three Renoir paintings and his brother, nine. When Renoir was ejected from Fontenay-aux-Roses, he returned to Paris. The previous year, he and his brother Edmond had rented a small apartment and a modest fourth-floor studio at 35 rue Saint-Georges, in the ninth arrondissement in the Batignolles area, below Montmartre, where, the decade before, as described earlier, Renoir had attended cafés with Manet and his other friends. Renoir’s studio was a sociable hub where many of his non-artist friends came to pose with the attractive women who were his models. In addition, Renoir often rented a second studio. Hence, when working on Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette (see page 86),164 he leased a house with a garden near the dance hall at 12–14 rue Cortot (now housing the Musée de Montmartre). In 1879, when Edmond was writing an article for the magazine La Vie moderne (Modern Life), he described Renoir’s process: ‘[What does he do] when he paints the Moulin de la Galette? For six months, he lives there, he will make friends with all of these people who have their unique charm that his models would not be able to imitate, and as he mixes with the joyful mood of the popular dancehall, he paints its swirling movement with stunning vivacity…. So, his work, besides its artistic value, has the entire spell of an exact picture faithful to modern life. What he pictured, we can see it every day, is our real life that he captured in images that will be remembered as being among the most lively and the most harmonious of our time.’165

  During the seven years after Lise left him in 1872 and his next major model, whom he met in September 1878, was Renoir intimate with any of his models? Without letters by, to and about Renoir from this time, we cannot know. During these years, Renoir painted several of his greatest romantic paintings, such as The Loge, 1874, The Swing, 1876, Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876, Leaving the Conservatory and Woman in the Boat, both 1877.166 Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette in particular, as a large and prominent painting of modern life, held a place in Renoir’s and his admirers’ hearts. Although the painting is filled with faces, we have no reliable way of identifying the models. In this period, there is no evidence that Renoir had one key model. Rather, many different women posed – professional models, actresses, as well as casual acquaintances. Similarly, Renoir’s male models included his brother, Edmond, and his numerous friends, including some of his fellow artists. Since Renoir’s daily-life paintings were not portraits but idealized figures, different people modelled for the same figure. This procedure continued throughout his life, and even, on occasion, a woman would pose for a man’s figure.167

  According to Georges Rivière (a journalist and government official in the Ministry of Finance) in his monograph Renoir and his Friends, which was published in 1921 two years after Renoir’s death and written almost fifty years after the time discussed, Renoir had many female models in the 1870s (Angèle, Anna, Estelle, Nini and others).168 Rivière’s recollections so long afterwards have little credibility. However, we can document that two actresses and one model did pose for Renoir in the mid-1870s: the actresses were Henriette Henriot and Jeanne Samary; the model was Margot Legrand.

  Mlle Henriot (Marie Henriette Grossin) modelled for eleven paintings by Renoir from 1874 through 1876. Because she was well known, he exhibited his first painting of her, a large work showing a fashionable Parisian woman, in the first Impressionist group show in 1874. In other images the actress appears in the guise of a male courtier in front of a partially drawn curtain, and being drawn by a man in a sketchbook. These la
st two works reflect on the art that both model and painter created, relating to the actual life behind the paintings. It is not known if Renoir paid her for modelling, but he did give her two paintings: the last painting he made of her, in which she wears a low-cut bodice,169 and A Vase of Flowers.170

  A year after Henriette Henriot ceased to model, Renoir persuaded a more famous actress of the Comédie-Française, Jeanne Samary, to pose (her full name was Léontine Pauline Jeanne Samary and she was married). She appears in at least ten works between 1877 and 1882 in oil, pastel and on cement (two cement medallions, a medium he experimented with in hopes of being able to paint frescoes).171 As with Mlle Henriot, Renoir often exhibited works for which Mlle Samary posed, as he did with her bust portrait, which he sent to the 1877 Impressionist group show.172 He exhibited her full-length portrait at the Salon of 1879, and gave her and her husband several of the portraits for which she modelled, which suggests that she probably was not paid for posing.173

  These women modelling in Renoir’s studio drew his male friends there. Among those whom Renoir convinced to pose was the artist Gustave Caillebotte, a wealthy engineer and painter of modern Paris. Renoir and Caillebotte met in April 1874 at the first Impressionist group show. Like Bazille and Jules Le Coeur, Caillebotte became a close friend, almost like a family member. Unlike Le Coeur, Caillebotte trusted Renoir completely from the time that they met until Caillebotte’s death twenty years later. Two years after they met, Caillebotte, then aged twenty-eight, made his will, since his younger brother, René, had already died at the age of twenty-six. Caillebotte chose Renoir, then thirty-five, to be the executor of his estate. In his will, he wrote: ‘I would like Renoir to be the executor of my will and to accept a painting of his choice; my heirs will insist that he take an important one.’174 The wording suggests that he felt that Renoir was modest and would not select one of the more valuable paintings.