Renoir

by Barbara Ehrlich White

  Jacques-Émile did not perceive Renoir the same way. Around the same time, he wrote to his father describing what had transpired: ‘Renoir came to see us yesterday. Mother had invited him, as you know, to come to work with me. Since we did not have a room ready, we were unable to put him up, and it’s a good thing, as you’ll see. Mother invited him for dinner. We were at the table for a little less than forty-five minutes (usually it takes us fifteen or twenty minutes). Mother got so impatient that she said it would be impossible for her to dine with him. After having invited him, Mother told me the worst things about him. She says he lacks wit, is a scribbler, a slow eater and makes unbearable nervous movements. In short, Mother will do everything she can to uninvite him…. Renoir made a painting of a sunset in ten minutes. That exasperated Mother, who told him that he was only “wasting paint”! Well, it’s a good thing that he doesn’t notice anything. As for me, I didn’t say a word to Mama, I was so annoyed.’168

  Despite his mother’s attitude to Renoir, Jacques-Émile remained a faithful admirer and, the next summer, wrote to his father: ‘Right now, I am seeing Renoir a lot and I have greater and greater affection for him. One doesn’t realize the enormous qualities of this being, first seeming so boorish.’ Then he quoted a letter about Renoir that he had received from Maître: ‘“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.’”169 Jacques-Émile and his mother never agreed about Renoir. Later the young artist purchased some of Renoir’s works.170

  After his 1881 summer in Dieppe, the next time that Renoir travelled, he took Aline with him. They left for Italy in late October, six months after he had returned from Algeria. It is unsurprising that Renoir invited Aline since he had missed her terribly in Algeria and had twice promised to take her with him when he returned abroad. They travelled well together on a trip that was originally planned to be two months but turned out to be six. There is substantial evidence that Aline accompanied him throughout, between his departure from Paris in late October 1881 and his return in late April 1882. In March 1882, there was a report in an Algiers newspaper, L’Akhbar, that ‘the painter Renoir and his wife’ had just arrived from Marseilles on the steamer Moeris.171 Further evidence that the couple was together is the fact that Aline saved no letters from Renoir during these six months. Since she had saved ten letters from his first Algerian trip, she would presumably have saved more from a six-month trip. Aline was also the model for the most important painting Renoir did in Italy, the Blonde Bather (see page 92).172

  Another reason why we can be confident that Aline was with him is her assertion, fourteen years later, to Berthe Morisot’s daughter, Julie Manet, and to her own children, that she and Renoir went to Italy on their honeymoon. Julie wrote in her diary: ‘Madame Renoir told us [Julie and her mother] about her trip to Italy after her wedding. We found it quite funny to hear her telling us all this, because we’d so often heard M. Renoir talk about it as though he had made the trip on his own, back in the days when we didn’t know his wife. She was twenty-two and very slim, she [Aline] said, which is hard to believe.’173 Jean Renoir also later recorded that his mother told him that she travelled to Italy on her honeymoon.174

  In essence, this trip was indeed a honeymoon for the couple, who were much in love. Yet they did not marry for another nine years. However, in several paintings of nudes, the model wears a prominent wedding ring on her left hand, as she does in Blonde Bather. Nonetheless, this was a common custom for early Renoir nudes, such as Bather with Griffon, 1870, and Nude in the Sunlight, 1875, perhaps for the sake of propriety.175

  As Julie Manet’s diary reveals, Renoir told no one that Aline was with him, and even kept this secret for more than a decade. He wanted her presence to be hidden from most of his friends, patrons and dealer. Hence his letters during the trip imply or state that he was travelling alone, as he wrote to Deudon: ‘I’m a little bored far from Montmartre and…I find that the ugliest Parisian woman is better looking than the most beautiful Italian woman.’176 To Manet he wrote from Capri: ‘[Here] I am the only French person.’177 Only two people knew that Aline was with him during these months – his brother Edmond and his friend Cézanne.

  The itinerary of Renoir’s two-month stay in Italy can be figured out from his Venetian sketchbook and his letters. (The book, some 13 × 20 centimetres [5 × 8 inches] bears a purchase label from a store in Venice: ‘Biasutti…Venezia’.178) Within the sketchbook are drawings from his Italian trip and from his second Algerian trip. His itinerary is also corroborated in his letters to Durand-Ruel, Bérard, Charpentier, Chocquet and Deudon, and to Édouard Manet. We learn that Renoir and Aline were in Venice on 1 November 1881.179 Renoir’s intended route is clearly stated in a letter from Venice to Mme Charpentier: ‘I’ve started in the north and I am going down the entire boot [of Italy] while I am here and when I will have finished, I’ll have a great time coming to have lunch with you.’ In the same letter, he includes a poem for her: ‘I’m leaving for Rome/Farewell – Venice-i-ce/my beautiful country/promised land/beautiful paradice-ra-dice.’180 Around the same time, he wrote a similar poem to Deudon: ‘Farewell Venice-i-ce, my beautiful grey sky, promised land, beautiful paradice-ra-dice. I’m going to Rome and after to Naples. I want to see the Raphaels, yes, Sir, the Ra/the pha/the els. After that, who would not be content…I bet they’ll say that I was influenced!’181

  After Venice, Renoir and Aline took the train south, not stopping in Florence but going directly to Rome, where Renoir could study the Raphael frescoes at the Farnesina and the Vatican. He wrote to Durand-Ruel praising these frescoes when he arrived in Naples on 21 November.182 While there, he went to see the ancient frescoes from Pompeii that were preserved in the Naples Museum. Later he wrote to Mme Charpentier: ‘I carefully observed the Museum of Naples; the paintings of Pompeii are extremely interesting from all points of view.’183 Renoir’s focus on both the Raphael and Pompeian frescoes suggests that he was looking to learn from great muralists of the past to further his goal of creating a new kind of architectural painting, murals inside public buildings. He hoped to create his own mural style different but comparable to that of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, the only well-known contemporary muralist of whose works Renoir approved.184

  In Naples, Renoir and Aline stayed at the Albergo de la Trinacria at 11 Piazza Principessa Margherita, where they lived on and off for the next two months. They took a trip to Capri, where they stayed at the Hôtel du Louvre.185 There, Renoir wrote to Manet hoping that he would soon get nominated a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.186 Renoir and Aline also travelled to Sorrento. In mid-January, Renoir made a trip to Calabria and then to Palermo to paint Wagner after he had completed his opera Parsifal. Back in Naples, after about a week, Renoir and Aline boarded a train to France. By 23 January 1882, they were at the Hôtel des Bains à L’Estaque, near Marseilles.

  Italy was a common destination for artists, given the classical works of the past available for study. Not only earlier artists had travelled there, but also some of Renoir’s friends. At forty, Renoir was a latecomer to this source of inspiration, Degas having gone when he was twenty-one for three years and Manet twice in his twenties. Morisot went to Italy the year before Renoir but soon had to return because her daughter became ill.187 Renoir was still in awe of the things he saw there when he wrote in late 1883 to Deudon, who was then travelling in Naples: ‘Go to see the Naples Museum. Not the oils but the frescoes. Spend your life there.’188

  As in Algiers, Renoir spent much of his time in Italy painting, since he needed to keep
sending back works to both his dealer and his studio. Indeed, many people encouraged him to paint during his trip, Manet for example, writing: ‘you will without a doubt bring us back a mass of works all personal and interesting…. Bring back a lot of canvases.’189 Renoir had hoped to paint Italians but, as in Algiers, he had trouble finding models. As he wrote to Deudon: ‘To get someone to pose, you have to be very friendly and above all know the language.’190 Renoir did not know Italian. Nonetheless, he painted a few locals: in Venice two studies of the head of a woman, in Naples a girl’s head, Mother and Child191 and Italian Girl with Tambourine.192

  During these two months in Italy, Renoir only made one portrait, that of Wagner, whom he painted for Georges Charpentier. After Charpentier received the portrait, Renoir wrote to him: ‘If the portrait that I made for you of Wagner is good enough and if you want to inscribe it with a word of explanation, you can write that this portrait was done at Palermo on January 15, 1882, the day after Wagner completed Parsifal.’193 Immediately after completing the portrait, Renoir had written a long letter to Charpentier, describing how uncomfortable he had felt during the brief thirty-five minute sitting: ‘[I]…was very nervous and regretted that I wasn’t Ingres.’ He blamed his nervousness on timidity, saying ‘the shy person who pushes himself goes too far’.194 Wagner’s wife, Cosima, noted Renoir’s agitated manner in her diary on 15 January 1882: ‘[Renoir] amuses R. [Wagner] with his nervousness and his many grimaces as he works.’195 After Wagner’s death a year later, on 13 February 1883, Renoir made a graphite and charcoal copy of his portrait that was published with the obituary in La Vie moderne on 24 February 1883.196

  The largest number of paintings Renoir made in Italy were landscapes of well-known tourist destinations. In Venice, he drew in the sketchbook already mentioned and painted The Grand Canal, The Doges’ Palace, Saint Mark’s Square, Fog in Venice and A Gondola; in and around Naples, The Sea in Capri, Capo di Monte, Sorrento, Garden in Sorrento, Vesuvius in the Morning, Vesuvius in the Evening and, south of Naples, Landscape in Calabria.197 Yet, his true goal in Italy was to improve his Impressionist style. He was never satisfied with repeating the same manner of expression. After leaving Rome and once he arrived in Naples, on 21 November, he wrote to his dealer: ‘I am still suffering from the illness of experimenting. I am unhappy and I erase, I erase again. I hope that this obsessive habit will end; this is why I am sending you news. I don’t think I will bring much back from my trip, but I think I will have made progress, which always happens after long periods of study. We always return to our first loves, but with a little extra note…. I am like children at school, the blank page always needs to be well written and then bam! An ink blot. I am still making those mistakes, and I’m 40 years old. I went to see the Raphaels in Rome. They are very beautiful and I should have seen them sooner. They are full of knowledge and wisdom. He was not searching for the impossible, like I am, but it’s beautiful.’198 And, five days later, he wrote to Bérard: ‘I’ve tried everything, painting with turpentine, with wax, with siccative [a drying agent] etc…all that, only to revert to the painting I started with. But from time to time I have these obsessions that cost me dearly and don’t move me forward at all.’199 His frustration was palpable as he struggled to transform his style.

  Renoir was trying to give his figures more solidity and his compositions more structure at the same time as retaining Impressionist light and colour. In Italy, he hoped to learn how to acquire the ‘grandeur’ that Cézanne had achieved, and it is likely that it was Cézanne’s style that led Renoir to Italy. Renoir was attempting to emulate the classical and sculptural qualities of Cézanne’s art, but in his own way. The word ‘grandeur’ was what Georges Rivière (probably prompted by Renoir) had written about Cézanne’s art four years earlier, in his 1877 L’Impressionniste: journal d’art article: ‘The movements of the figures are simple and noble…. The painting has an astounding grandeur.’ And: ‘the landscapes are utterly majestic…. The works are comparable to the most beautiful works of antiquity.’200

  Renoir repeated Rivière’s exact words when, from Italy in 1881, he wrote about both the Raphael frescoes in Rome and the Pompeian frescoes at the Naples Museum. The idea of simplicity and grandeur struck him as soon as he had seen the Raphael frescoes and stayed with him even two months later when he had returned to France. From Naples, he wrote to Durand-Ruel of the Raphaels in Rome: ‘I prefer Ingres in oil painting. But the [Raphael] frescoes, they are admirable in their simplicity and grandeur.’201 In late January or early February 1882, he wrote to Mme Charpentier about his trip to the Naples Museum: ‘Thus I remain in the sun – not to paint portraits in the light – but while warming myself and observing a lot, I think I will have gained that grandeur and simplicity of the ancient painters.’202

  The key painting of these Italian studies, inspired by Cézanne, Raphael and Pompeian frescoes, was Blonde Bather (see page 92). Aline posed for this work at the Bay of Naples. Here Renoir initiated his unique blend of Impressionism and Classicism, the direction for his future artistic development. He does not renounce Impressionism, but combines it with classicism, creating a new style, Classical Impressionism. This synthesis became the major direction of his artistic explorations in the paintings of the next thirty-eight years. The Blonde Bather is Classical in the solidity of the well-defined body as well as the clarity and balance of the pyramidal composition, while also being Impressionist in its pervasive light, bright varied colours and visible brushstrokes. It resembles Raphael’s fresco The Birth of Galatea in the Villa Farnesina, in that the timeless nude is separated from her surroundings. There is a clear edge around her solid, pyramidal body. Renoir’s 1881 nude is different from his Nude in the Sunlight of six years before, in which the nude merges into the surrounding tall grass and the effect is ephemeral. Two still lifes that Renoir did in Naples, Onions and Fruits of the Midi, have similar qualities.203 The round solid forms of the fruit resemble the round solid forms of the bather’s breasts, head and body.

  Renoir sold Blonde Bather to a prominent Parisian jeweller, Henri Vever, and inscribed the canvas: ‘À Monsieur H. Vever/Renoir.81’. He shipped his paintings back to Paris and had Bérard take care of his submissions to the 1882 Salon. Renoir chose two works: Blonde Bather and Portrait of Mlle Yvonne Grimprel.204 It is perhaps surprising that the jury rejected Blonde Bather and accepted the little girl’s portrait. Doubtless, Renoir was disappointed that his first attempt at Classical Impressionism was rejected. However, in the spring of 1882, Durand-Ruel asked him to make another version of this nude, which he later sold to Paul Gallimard. This second version has an even clearer delineation of the nude’s body.205 By requesting a second version, Durand-Ruel was encouraging Renoir to proceed in this new direction. The second Blonde Bather was even more Classical and monumental, with greater separation between the body of the nude and the surroundings.

  Since this new Classical Impressionism evolved out of a search for qualities that Renoir saw in Cézanne, it is not surprising that his first stop back in France was to visit Cézanne. On 23 January 1882, he informed his dealer: ‘I ran into Cézanne and we are going to work together. In about two weeks, I will have the pleasure of shaking your hand.’206 Renoir expected to be back in Paris by 7 February. Despite the fact that Cézanne dined every evening with his parents in Aix-en-Provence, he lived nearby in L’Estaque with his secret mistress, Hortense Fiquet, and their nine-year-old son, Paul Cézanne junior. Given Cézanne’s unusual living arrangement, Renoir felt no hesitation about bringing Aline along. They settled in L’Estaque, too, living at the Hôtel des Bains, also known as the Maison Mistral.

  The two artists painted side by side: Cézanne, Ravine near L’Estaque, and Renoir, Rocky Crags at L’Estaque, signed and dated ‘Renoir.82’.207 Renoir’s new broad structure, clear definition of the mountain tops and parallel strokes in his landscape were clearly inspired by techniques that Cézanne was using at the time, as well as the lessons of the frescoes of Raphael and Pompeia
n artists. Renoir so admired Cézanne’s work that when he left L’Estaque he took several sketches discarded by Cézanne while forgetting some of his own completed paintings. The following March, 1883, he wrote asking Cézanne to send back these paintings since he wanted to include them in an exhibition Durand-Ruel was planning for that April.208 Years later, Renoir revealed: ‘I have some sketches of his [Cézanne’s] that I found among the rocks of L’Estaque, where he worked. They are beautiful, but he was so intent on others – better ones that he meant to paint – that he forgot these, or threw them away as soon as he had finished them.’209

  On 14 February 1882, Cézanne was making plans to go to Paris. Renoir, however, who had expected to return there a week earlier, was still in L’Estaque, gravely ill. He wrote to Durand-Ruel that for the past eight days he had been in bed with ‘a terrible flu’.210 His condition worsened, and around 19 February, he wrote again to Durand-Ruel: ‘I’m knocked out because of pneumonia.’211 Pissarro conveyed this information to Monet on 24 February (‘Renoir is very sick in L’Estaque’).212 The same day, Edmond Renoir came to help him. Cézanne, despite his customary aloofness, became concerned about Renoir’s health: on 2 March, Renoir wrote to Chocquet: ‘Cézanne was incredibly kind to me…. He wanted to bring me everything from his house…because he is returning to Paris.’213