When Pierre was three months old, their first family trip was to La Roche-Guyon, a small town 72 kilometres (45 miles) north-west of Paris, near Giverny, where they rented a house from June through August. Two months later, they went to Essoyes from September through October so Aline could show off her baby to her relatives.31 The next summer, 1886, they returned to La Roche-Guyon for the month of July. Then they rented a house, La Maison Perrette, on the coast of Brittany in Saint-Briac for the months of August and September. They returned to Essoyes for Christmas and New Year of 1886.32 In 1887, Renoir signed the lease for 15 June 1887 to 1 April 1888 on a house and enclosed garden in the Paris suburb of Le Vésinet.33 In January 1888, Renoir, Aline and Pierre went to visit with Cézanne and his family at Jas de Bouffan, a property that Cézanne owned near Aix-en-Provence. Then they moved to the Hôtel Rouget in Martigues (46 kilometres/29 miles south-west of Aix) during February and March 1888. In the summer after leaving Cézanne country, Renoir and his family went for an extended visit at Caillebotte’s home in Petit-Gennevilliers, near Argenteuil, in July 1888 and again in September 1888. They returned to Essoyes in November and December 1888.
Among these various rural abodes, Aline’s favourite destination was her hometown, where she had lived for her first fifteen years. During her childhood, her relatives had viewed her with a combination of pity and disdain because of her parents’ situations and her own rebelliousness. Now, more than a decade later, Aline returned proudly as both the common-law-wife and mother of the child of a famous artist. While she loved being in Essoyes, Renoir complained to Bérard that he was lonely since there were no other painters around: ‘I have started to work again, but without much enthusiasm, because I am absolutely alone here.’34
The Renoirs’ frequent rural vacations were more pleasurable for Aline than for Renoir, who took a long time to accustom himself to living far from Paris. One of his ways of coping with isolation was to leave Aline and baby Pierre for a few days to go on painting trips. When Pierre was eighteen months old, Renoir left them and wrote from outside Paris to Murer: ‘I have just returned from Champagne to see my son and I will be returning to Argenteuil in order to finish a ton of things I started.’35 Renoir’s escapes to Argenteuil and other suburbs of Paris satisfied his need to be closer to his favourite city. Later, when Pierre was three, Renoir had become more comfortable with the rural way of life, as he wrote to Morisot and her husband from Essoyes: ‘I’m becoming more and more rustic, and I realize a little late that winter is the really good time: the fire in the large fireplaces never gives you a headache, the blaze is cheerful, and the wooden clogs keep you from being afraid of cold feet, not to mention the chestnuts and the potatoes cooked under the ashes, and the light wine of the Côte d’Or.’36
When in the countryside, Renoir often invited trusted friends to visit and, whenever possible, he rented a large enough cottage to accommodate them, such as a house for three months in La Roche-Guyon, north-west of Paris.37 The first guests after Pierre was born were Cézanne, Hortense and their son Paul, aged thirteen, from 15 June to 11 July 1885, just as Renoir and Aline had visited them three years earlier in L’Estaque.38 Cézanne informed Zola that he was at: ‘Grande Rue, Cézanne at Renoir’s, at La Roche.’39 Cézanne’s painting, Turn in the Road at La Roche-Guyon, and Renoir’s La Roche-Guyon (Houses), both 1885, might have been painted side by side; both have the same distinctive rooftops.40 Renoir also made another Cézannesque landscape there, with two small figures on the path.41 Cézanne either gave his painting to Renoir or left it behind when he left La Roche-Guyon, since his painting was in Renoir’s collection.42
Before and during the Cézannes’ visit at La Roche-Guyon, Renoir tried to help Cézanne. His generosity towards his friend had been evident in 1877 when he had encouraged Rivière to write enthusiastically about Cézanne’s painting in L’Impressionniste: journal d’art. Eight years later, Renoir was again acting generously when he tried to persuade his own dealer, Durand-Ruel, to include Cézanne among the large roster of Impressionist painters whom he then represented (Degas, Manet, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley). However, Durand-Ruel had refused to represent Cézanne, whom Renoir considered the greatest among his contemporaries. More than a decade after Durand-Ruel had become the main Impressionist dealer, Renoir decided to try again and, in 1885, he brought Durand-Ruel a Cézanne watercolour still life, Carafe and Bowl, of 1879–82, which he hoped the dealer would purchase for the modest sum of 200 francs. After not hearing from Durand-Ruel for a long time, Renoir concluded that the dealer did not want the work, not even for 200 francs. Even so, while the Cézannes were visiting in June–July 1885, Renoir wrote to the dealer from La-Roche-Guyon: ‘Madame Cézanne [the Cézannes did not marry until 1886] is supposed to stop by your place to get the 200 francs for the still life. I had brought you this picture thinking that I might encourage this great artist to bring you other things.’ This sentence reveals Renoir’s passion for Cézanne’s work and his willingness to confront his dealer to assert his evaluation of Cézanne’s art, knowing full well Durand-Ruel’s opinion. Since nothing had come of Renoir’s plan, he told Durand-Ruel that he was free to return the picture to Mme Cézanne. Or, to be respectful of her feelings, Renoir suggested that Durand-Ruel could make an exchange by giving Mme Cézanne the 200 francs but keeping a Renoir work worth the same and giving Renoir the Cézanne still life. As Renoir wrote in the same letter: ‘I’ll swap with you, as we agreed.’ He excused himself: ‘not wanting to make you responsible for something that I had wanted to happen that had not succeeded, which should teach me to mind my own business’. In his deferential manner, Renoir concluded his letter by apologizing: ‘Please excuse me for this fiasco.’43 Durand-Ruel refused to buy Cézanne’s Carafe and Bowl and never became his dealer. Instead, Renoir acquired the still life and Mme Cézanne was pleased with the 200 francs.
While Cézanne had been willing to work alongside Renoir in 1882 and 1885, Monet still felt strongly, as he had in January 1884, that working with another artist would be detrimental to his painting. Thus when Renoir invited him to visit, Monet turned him down. Renoir had not fully understood Monet’s feelings, so he continued to try to entice him to stay. In August 1886, while Renoir was renting La Maison Perrette in Saint-Briac, Brittany, he even wrote to Durand-Ruel of his intentions: ‘I wrote to Monet to point out beautiful things for him [in Saint-Briac].’44 As he wrote to Monet, ‘I have a house for two months with five or six rooms for the two of us, and if you’re interested, and if you want to come, don’t worry about it, it wouldn’t be a problem’, signing it: ‘Your friend, Renoir.’45 Monet declined this invitation. Again, in January 1888, Monet refused to let Renoir visit him, as Monet explained to his wife: ‘He is settled in Aix at Cézanne’s house, but he complains of the cold and he asks if where I am is warm and beautiful. Naturally I am not going to try to get him to come.’46
Another possible reason for Monet’s unwillingness to be with Renoir was the occasional friction between them. For example, in an 1885 gathering, presumably at the Café Riche in Paris, Monet mocked Renoir in a way that deeply hurt his feelings. (The Café Riche was the location of monthly Impressionist dinners from 1885 to 1894 where those in attendance included Monet, Renoir, Caillebotte, Pissarro and Sisley.) Subsequently, Renoir wrote to Caillebotte, who had also been present, asking if he would first write to Monet to explain: ‘it pisses me off. It is of no use to be made fun of…. I will write to Monet myself after you do.’ At the end of his letter, Renoir repeated ‘Please write to Monet.’47 This is typical of how he approached problems with friends; he tried not to confront the issue head on, but to soften it by using other friends to help him.
Renoir wanted to continue his working relationship with Cézanne. Three years later, after the Cézannes had spent time with the Renoirs in La Roche-Guyon, in January 1888, Renoir told Monet to write to him: ‘at Cézanne’s house, Jas de Bouffan, Aix-en-Provence’.48 However, the Renoirs’ stay with Cézanne’s family was shor
t-lived, as Renoir later explained to Monet: ‘We suddenly had to leave Mother Cézanne’s home because of the sordid stinginess prevailing at that house.’ It may have been Cézanne’s mother whom Renoir considered stingy, but that did not deter him from deciding to remain in the area in order to continue painting with Cézanne: the Renoirs moved to the Hotel Rouget in Martigues for the next two months.49 In March 1889, Cézanne wrote to Zola that Renoir ‘asked me to send him two landscapes that he had left at my house last year’.50
During the summer of 1889, Renoir and his family returned to be near Cézanne. This time they rented a house from Cézanne’s brother-in-law, Maxime Conil, in Montbriant, a property west of Aix. Renoir made several landscapes of the same motifs that Cézanne was painting, so the two artists could have been painting side by side. Of Mont Ste-Victoire, Renoir made two oils and of The Pigeon Tower at Bellevue two oils and an oil study.51 Throughout the 1880s, Cézanne adopted bright, varied colours and a luminous atmosphere reminiscent of Renoir.52 Renoir, for his part, continued to be inspired by Cézanne’s grandeur and simplicity, while both artists painted with parallel brushstrokes.
In addition to spending time with Cézanne and his family, the Renoirs also visited Pierre’s godfather, Caillebotte, and his companion, Charlotte. In September 1888, when Pierre was three, Caillebotte invited them to spend time at his home at Petit-Gennevilliers, north of Paris.53 There, Caillebotte painted a half-length portrait of Aline outdoors, wearing a straw hat, surrounded by flowers.54 Three years later, on another visit, Caillebotte again painted Aline outdoors, this time in a full-length seated portrait.55 Just as Renoir in 1883 had given Caillebotte his portrait of Charlotte,56 in 1891, Caillebotte gave Renoir his full-length portrait of Aline.
While Renoir was spending time with Cézanne and Caillebotte, perhaps the biggest influence on his art in the mid-1880s was the popular muralist, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Puvis, seventeen years older than Renoir, was a friend of Morisot, a client of Durand-Ruel and an artist for whom Valadon had modelled. His works had traditional themes, such as the Mother and Child (alluding to the Virgin and Christ Child)57 and nudes (alluding to classical statues of Venus) with clearly defined figures but with no Impressionist colour, light or paint-strokes. It was during the years 1884–87, while Renoir and his family were spending so much time visiting with friends or renting inexpensive rural cottages, that he was experimenting with his Ingrist Impressionist style, which was also influenced by Puvis.
Study of two nudes for The Large Bathers, c. 1886–87. Red chalk on yellowish paper, 125 × 140 cm (49¼ × 55⅛ in.). The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Bequest of Maurice Wertheim
One of the features of Renoir’s art during this period is a focus on drawing and minute detail. Uniquely in these four years, Renoir saved more drawings than paintings. Sometimes he even planned the pastel drawing as the final finished work while the oil was more sketchy and less complete. This is evident in the detailed large pastel, Girl with the Rose, signed and dated ‘Renoir.86’,58 and the smaller, related Girl in Straw Hat, which omits the lower part of the pastel with the rose and is signed but not dated.59 Similarly, the pastel Laundress and Child may be compared with the slightly larger but less detailed oil that omits the two figures in the background.60 Sometimes Renoir executed only a detailed portrait drawing, such as the portrait of Madeleine Adam, then fourteen years old, the daughter of a banker.61
Renoir’s major works of this Ingrist Impressionist period until 1889 were three paintings in the Nursing series and The Large Bathers, 1887 (see pages 96 and 194). He planned to exhibit one Nursing with The Large Bathers. For these important works, he made numerous preparatory oil sketches and drawings, such as the drawings for Nursing and the oil sketches and drawings for Large Bathers; several of even the smallest features such as fingernails or leaves were planned in detailed drawings.62
For the Nursing paintings, we learn about Renoir’s method from a diary entry by Morisot whom Renoir invited to visit his studio on 11 January 1886: ‘Visit to Renoir. On a stand, a red pencil and chalk drawing of a young mother nursing her child, charming in subtlety and gracefulness. As I admired it, he showed me a whole series done from the same model and with about the same movement. He is a draftsman of the first order; it would be interesting to show all these preparatory studies for a painting, to the public, which generally imagines that the Impressionists work in a very casual way. I do not think it possible to go further in the rendering of form.’63 Although Renoir showed Morisot numerous drawings of Aline nursing baby Pierre, Morisot assumed that the subject was only a model.64 As noted earlier, Renoir never informed Morisot that this woman and child were his own family (see page 137).
Morisot was enamoured with Renoir’s new direction, but he was having problems with his linear style. Renoir had never before had such difficulty, from Realism in 1866, to Impressionism in 1868, to Realist Impressionism in 1878 and finally to his early Classical Impressionism in 1881. However, when he embarked on Ingrist Impressionism in 1884, he struggled to integrate Ingrist linearism with Impressionist colour, stroke and luminosity. His joy in painting became tarnished by confusion and anguish. By 1886, his artistic direction had eluded him. This led him to destroy some of his works, resulting in the fewest number of extant paintings from any period of his life.
Starting in 1886 – especially in the second half – Renoir wrote letters expressing his frustration with his new style. In August, in a letter from La Roche-Guyon to his old friend and patron Bérard, he wrote: ‘I scratch out, I start again, and I think that the year will go by without my having finished a single painting. This is why I refuse to allow the visit of any painters… I prevented Durand-Ruel from coming over. I want to discover what I am looking for before I give up. Let me keep trying… I have gotten too deeply involved in my search to give up without regretting it… Fortune maybe at the end.’65 He did indeed complete fewer paintings than the preceding year: only two of his works are dated ‘Renoir.86’66 and only four or five others seem to have been completed that year. In this time of confusion, unlike all other times in Renoir’s life, it seems that he wanted to work alone. However, this does not seem to have done him much good. In another letter to Bérard from that period, he wrote: ‘I am depressed. I was waiting to be in a better mood – which will be difficult because I have truly lost my year. I am unable to start painting. I’m at a point where I’m just waiting for winter with impatience to be in my studio, since outdoors hasn’t worked for me this year. But, I don’t want to cry any longer on your shoulder since a good sunburst will quickly make me forget my displeasure, but it doesn’t want to come. I’ll write to you when I am more in control of myself.’67 Around the same time, he also confided in Murer: ‘I’m being asked for figure work, and I’m doing some, or rather I’m trying to do some. Generally it costs me a lot to get to the point where I stop scratching them out.’68
After having worked with such frustration in August and September 1886 in Brittany, Renoir complained in a letter to Monet in mid-October: ‘When I got to Paris, I scraped everything [off the canvases], canvases on which I had worked tirelessly and where I thought I had found great art as did Pissarro.’69 Here Renoir was being sarcastic, since he disliked Pissarro’s new style. Alone among the Impressionists, aside from Renoir, Pissarro had struck out in a new direction, following Seurat and others into a Pointillist, Neo-Impressionist style, which Renoir detested. By comparing his own work to Pissarro’s in this way, he was expressing his extreme dissatisfaction with his own experiments. Pissarro himself was aware of Renoir’s turmoil, and later told Lucien about the summer of 1886: ‘Apparently…Renoir destroyed all he had done during last year’s summer.’70 Meanwhile, Monet reiterated this in a letter to his wife: ‘When he returned to Paris, he scratched out everything he had brought back from Brittany, but nonetheless, he expects to have a good show at Petit’s gallery.’71
Despite his frustrations with his style, Renoir felt that his next exhibition
would bring a positive response. At this time he was preparing his major work, The Large Bathers, for which he had made numerous preparatory drawings, as noted earlier, over the course of several years and for which he had great hopes (see page 194).72 He expressed his conflicting disappointment and optimism in a letter to Bérard: ‘I’ll begin working immediately because Durand keeps repeating paintings, paintings…paintings, and the paintings never come because I’ve scraped off everything. Yet in spite of this I am persuaded that I’m going to surpass Raphael and that in 1887 the people shall be dumbfounded.’73
While Renoir was struggling with his style, Durand-Ruel was spending increasing amounts of time promoting sales in New York. Renoir felt abandoned and believed that his dealer would not find a better market in America than he had in France. While Durand-Ruel was away, another Parisian art dealer, Georges Petit, held an exhibition at his gallery on rue de Sèze. From mid-June to mid-July 1886, Renoir had the opportunity to exhibit some works in his new style. His former patron, Mme Charpentier, helped him get into this show by loaning her painting, Mme Charpentier and her Children, 1878 (see page 91), which had been a success at the Salon of 1879. The Clapissons also loaned their Portrait of Mme Clapisson, which had appeared at the Salon of 1883. Along with these two older works, Renoir exhibited the third and final version of Nursing [with Cat], 1886, his new Ingrist Impressionist work (see page 96).74
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