Renoir

by Barbara Ehrlich White

  Among all the major art critics who reviewed the exhibition, Octave Mirbeau was the only one who liked Renoir’s new style. He praised Nursing for ‘the charm of the Primitives, precision of the Japanese, and the mastery of Ingres’.75 Renoir was so grateful for the positive review that he wrote to Mirbeau to thank him for his courageous article.76 Durand-Ruel, however, did not share Mirbeau’s opinion. On 18 July 1886, on his return from New York, he went to the Galérie Georges Petit and saw Renoir’s Nursing. As Pissarro wrote to his son on 27 July 1886, ‘Durand-Ruel went to Petit; he saw the Renoirs; he does not like his new style at all, not at all’.77 It is strange that Durand-Ruel so disliked Renoir’s new style since it has echoes of a renowned painting, Summer, or Harvest, of 1873 by Puvis de Chavannes, one of Durand-Ruel’s clients.78 In Puvis’s work, immediately purchased by the French government, in the foreground centre, a woman nurses an infant in a Classical style somewhat akin to Renoir’s Nursing.

  Despite Durand-Ruel’s dislike of Renoir’s new style and Renoir’s own reservations, he persevered, working harder than ever to complete The Large Bathers in time for Petit’s 1887 show. Aline posed for the central nude and Valadon for the nude on the left. Drawings for this work in progress had begun by January 1886, when Morisot visited Renoir’s studio.79 In her diary, she commented: ‘Two drawings of nude women going into the water I find as charming as the drawings of Ingres. He told me that nudes seemed to him to be one of the essential forms of art.’80

  In May and June 1887, The Large Bathers was exhibited at Georges Petit’s gallery. In the catalogue, Renoir added the title Experiment in Decorative Painting, expressing his desire for this work to be hung as a mural, as discussed in Chapter 2. He was affirming that his bathers were like Puvis de Chavannes’s popular decorative panels of semi-nudes, a success at the Salon of 1879.81 We know that Renoir had been interested in mural decoration since the Bibesco murals of 1868; a decade later, Georges Charpentier had unsuccessfully tried to help him find a government mural painting commission. Now, another decade later, Renoir hoped that his Bathers would show his abilities with wall decoration. As Nursing had traditional prototypes in images of the Virgin and Child, so The Large Bathers calls to mind art of the past – specifically François Girardon’s seventeenth-century relief of bathers from Versailles.82

  Most of the reactions to Renoir’s Large Bathers were negative, including the opinion of his dealer. Durand-Ruel had consistently disliked every example of Ingrist Impressionism that Renoir had shown him, including the pre-Ingrist portraits of his own family of 1882.83 Thus it was not surprising that he disapproved of Renoir’s newest work. Pissarro reported in October 1888: ‘[Renoir] told me that everyone, from Durand[-Ruel] to his old collectors, were criticizing him and attacking his attempts to abandon his romantic period [Impressionism].’84 While in January 1886, Morisot had thought Renoir was a skilful draughtsman, a year later in mid-May 1887, Pissarro had the opposite opinion: ‘Renoir, lacking a gift for drawing, and lacking the beautiful colours that he instinctively felt before, becomes incoherent.’ Pissarro explained his objection to Renoir’s new style: ‘As for Renoir, again the same hiatus…I do understand what he is trying to do; it’s very good not to want to stand still, but he chose to concentrate only on line; his figures detach themselves from one another without regard for colour; the result is something unintelligible.’85

  In fact, Pissarro’s dislike of Renoir’s Ingrist Impressionism echoed Renoir’s dislike of Pissarro’s Neo-Impressionism, causing friction between the two. Pissarro wrote in September 1887 that he had said to Renoir, ‘As to you, Renoir, you wander around at random. I know what I am doing.’86 He also reported other artists and critics who disliked Renoir’s new style. At the time of Petit’s May 1887 show, Pissarro wrote: ‘Bracquemond…was rather critical of Renoir, though he thought some parts of the large painting [The Large Bathers] very well drawn. I agree with him about the parts. It is the whole, the synthesis, which is faulty, and this they refuse to understand!’87 The next day Pissarro again informed Lucien: ‘I saw [the critic] Astruc who thundered forth against the decline of Renoir’s works.’88 A year later, in October 1888, Pissarro recounted Renoir’s troubles in more detail: ‘I had a long talk with Renoir…. He seems to be very sensitive about what we think of his exhibition. I told him that for us, the search for unity was the goal that every intelligent artist should aim for, that even with big faults, it is more intelligent and more artistic…. [With his new style] he doesn’t get any more portrait commissions!… For goodness sake!’89

  However, not everyone’s reaction was negative. Several of Renoir’s critic friends expressed favourable opinions. The Polish-born Téodor de Wyzewa praised The Large Bathers as ‘this gentle but strong painting’.90 Gustave Geffroy effused: ‘Here Renoir has doggedly worked towards an intellectual and pictorial ideal…[combining] the luminous purity of the primitives and the serene draftsmanship of Ingres.’91

  One artist who was deeply moved by Renoir’s works in this period was Vincent van Gogh, who was completely unknown at this point and who had never met (nor would ever meet) Renoir. Van Gogh had arrived in Paris in February 1886 and stayed for two years with his brother Theo, an art dealer. Theo, entrenched as he was in the world of Parisian art, must have taken his brother along to the Georges Petit exhibitions, since Van Gogh later wrote from the French countryside: ‘I very often think of Renoir and that pure clean line of his. That’s just how things and people look in this clean air…. There are women like a Fragonard and like a Renoir.’92

  In addition to Van Gogh, there were a few artists among Renoir’s friends who appreciated the new direction. His former student Blanche, by then a fashionable portraitist, was so enamoured of the 1887 Large Bathers that he purchased it in 1889 for the low price of 1,000 francs.93 Another admirer was Monet, who knew that Renoir had struggled with his new style and that Durand-Ruel had disliked Nursing the year before. Monet decided to try to help Renoir by writing to Durand-Ruel, who had not yet seen the Bathers: ‘Renoir made a superb painting of his bathers. Not understood by all, but by many.’94

  Perhaps the most important supporter of Renoir’s Ingrist Impressionism, however, was Berthe Morisot. She thought Renoir a superlative draughtsman and applauded his new focus on line. The same year that Renoir completed The Large Bathers, Morisot and her husband asked Renoir to paint an oil portrait of their daughter, Julie Manet (see page 195). Renoir made several preparatory drawings of Julie with a Cat and then traced the final drawing onto the canvas to serve as a guide for his painting.95 This portrait combines an Ingresque emphasis on the eyes and contour of the face with pervasive light and bright colours.

  Renoir loved Morisot as much as any artist friend he ever had. They were the same age but their backgrounds were totally different. When they first met, exhibiting together in 1874, Renoir must have been drawn to Morisot by her wealth and connections. She, like Bazille and Jules Le Coeur, was a potential source of support for him. But as time passed, their relationship became more profound, a friendship that would last beyond her death, which preceded his by twenty-four years. Renoir included Morisot and her art in the pantheon of his gifted friends. In 1882, when he was sick in L’Estaque, in a letter to his dealer, he had written that he was only willing to exhibit with ‘[real] artists like Monet, Sisley, Morisot, etc’.96 He later painted next to Morisot, just as he had earlier with Monet and Cézanne.97 However, Morisot, as a woman of the upper class, was excluded from the Café Riche gatherings since it would have been unseemly for her (or later, for similarly upper-class Mary Cassatt) to attend. Consequently, around the same time that the Café Riche meetings began, Morisot and her husband started a weekly dinner party at their fashionable Neuilly apartment – a party to which Aline was not invited. Although many attended these dinners, including Degas, Whistler and Mallarmé, Julie Manet wrote in her diary that Renoir, along with Mallarmé, was one of the two most regular attendees and that he had become an intimate friend of her parents.98


  Despite his closeness to Morisot, Renoir deliberately kept a large part of his life from her. As described earlier, though he had invited Morisot to his studio to see his drawings for Nursing, he hid the fact that these images his dear friend was seeing were of his own family. It is likely that Renoir was ashamed of his lower-class mistress and son in front of this high-class woman who had been married five years before her child was born. Renoir probably worried that he would lose Morisot’s respect if she knew who Aline and Pierre were. Yet, there is no doubt that he considered Aline an important part of his life. He loved her and Pierre dearly. His devotion to her is reflected in the ever-increasing girth of the nudes in his art, consistently portrayed with tenderness and affection. This paralleled Aline’s physical condition, which Renoir simultaneously worried about and painted lovingly. From the time she modelled for him until the end of his career, Renoir painted ample nudes, whether it was Aline or another woman posing, since voluptuous nudes were pleasing to many people of his time. Nonetheless, Aline’s increasing girth continued to trouble the artist. When Pierre was recuperating from his delicate operation, Renoir wrote to her: ‘Try to take care of your health conscientiously so that I don’t end up with two invalids, and try to exercise a little. I worry that your fat will play nasty tricks on you. I’ll admit that it isn’t easy to lose weight, but I wouldn’t want you to get sick before your time…. Take care of yourself.’99

  As with Morisot, despite his love for Aline, Renoir kept secrets from her. He never told her about his earlier children with his model, Lise. Also, Aline’s peasant background and her status as a secret kept her from being included in Renoir’s social circles. As has been seen, he would periodically leave her and their son behind to travel, work or socialize. This became a lifelong pattern such that they often led separate lives, communicating by letter to arrange to see one another frequently. Basically, Renoir liked his privacy and freedom, as he once expressed to his dealer: ‘do not think that I will sell my independence to anyone. It is the only thing that I hold dearly: the right to do foolish things.’100

  It was not until Renoir and Aline had been married for more than a year that Aline and Morisot finally met. Even then, Renoir was less than gracious about their introduction. Morisot and her family were at their vacation estate in Mézy, 43 kilometres (26 miles) north-west of Paris. Renoir was such a frequent guest there that he was invited to visit at any time without notifying the family that he was coming. One day, during the summer of 1891, he simply arrived in Mézy with Aline and Pierre, then aged six, and never made any introductions. In a letter to Mallarmé of 14 July 1891, Morisot exclaimed: ‘I saw Renoir for a moment with his family. I shall tell you about this later.’101 As promised, she wrote later: ‘I shall never succeed in describing to you my astonishment at the sight of this incredibly heavy woman whom, I don’t know why, I had imagined to be like her husband’s paintings.’102 Clearly, by this date, Morisot had learned that Renoir had a wife and child but in this letter expresses her disappointment and discomfiture at Aline’s actual appearance, which Renoir had idealized in his paintings.

  Besides Morisot and Aline, another woman who continued to command his affections was his widowed, elderly mother, Marguerite Merlet Renoir, then still living in Louveciennes with her daughter, Lisa, and Lisa’s husband, Charles Leray. Renoir’s mother was eighty in 1887, at which time Renoir, the dutiful son, wrote to Bérard how, whenever possible, he ‘commute[d] between Paris and Louveciennes’.103 The following year, in March 1888, in a letter to Durand-Ruel, the artist wrote: ‘My mother has pneumonia and the doctor is very worried.’104 Pneumonia was (and still is) the leading cause of death among the elderly. In a letter of 1883, Renoir had explained to Murer: ‘I go to Louveciennes every Thursday…. My mother has been sick for a year. When I have a free minute, I go to see her in Louveciennes.’105 His devotion to his mother continued until her death aged eighty-nine in 1896.

  As a man of late nineteenth-century France, Renoir wrote contradictory things about women. On the one hand, he was devoted to Morisot, Aline and his mother, treating each of them with respect. On the other, some of his statements on women in general would today be called sexist. To understand this, a modern person must understand the prevalent attitudes of the society in which Renoir lived. At that time, most men and women thought that women’s place was in the home and that their position should be decidedly second to the man in their family. Feminism was a new and radical idea that had not gained much traction in France, where most people felt it as a threat to their way of life. The concept of male superiority was so ingrained that women did not get the right to vote in France until 1944. In this light, had Renoir expressed feminist opinions, he would have been considered radical, something he avoided scrupulously throughout his life. To him, radical or revolutionary ideas conjured up images of the Paris civil war, the Commune of 1871.

  In 1888, when the critic Philippe Burty asked for Renoir’s opinion of feminism, Renoir replied: ‘I think literary women, lawyers and politicians like Georges Sand, Madame Adam, and other bores are monstrous; they’re nothing but calves with five hooves. The woman artist is completely ridiculous, but I certainly approve of the singer or the dancer. In Antiquity and amongst simple folk, a woman danced and sang, but nonetheless was no less a woman. Grace is her domain and even her duty. I well understand that today this ideal has been slightly tarnished, but what can we do? In ancient times, women sang and danced for free, for the pleasure of being charming and gracious. Today, it’s all for money which takes away the charm.’106 Renoir’s statement is shocking given his relationship with women, particularly with his fellow artist Morisot. It is clear that he thought of her as an exceptional woman. Years after her death, her daughter recalled in her diary: ‘Sometimes I think again of the sentence with which M. Renoir replied to M. Mallarmé when one Thursday evening, leaving the house, he was speaking of all of Maman’s qualities: “…and with all that, any other woman would find a way of being quite unbearable.”’107 The qualities of which Renoir was speaking were Morisot’s artistic talents, her beauty and her charms as a hostess.

  Today we view Renoir’s statement as belittling and disrespectful of women, but it must be viewed in the contexts of the time and Renoir’s desire to be uncontroversial. When he writes of Georges Sand being ‘monstrous…nothing but calves with five hooves’, he echoes others like Baudelaire, who had railed against Sand, writing that ‘she is stupid, heavy, and garrulous. Her ideas on morals have the same depth of judgment and delicacy of feeling as those of janitresses and kept women…. The fact that there are men who could become enamoured of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation.’108 In truth, Renoir’s actions of kindness, generosity, open-mindedness, love and respect for the women in his life speak louder than the words he sent his friend Burty.

  Renoir had plenty of reasons in 1888 for parroting the majority opinion. Not only were his controversial new Ingrist Impressionist style and lack of patrons causing problems, but also his health began to trouble him. Just as six years earlier he had feared that his pneumonia would return to haunt him, his new and sudden issues with his teeth and eyes inspired a terror that he would develop a much more serious illness that ultimately could prevent him from painting, a fate worse for him than death. Indeed, his fears were justified, since these symptoms turned out to be the warning signs of rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that would slowly debilitate him throughout the next thirty years until his death.109 In August 1888, Renoir wrote of his condition: ‘I woke up this morning with neuralgic head pains… I went to the dentist… I don’t know how long I am going to be wrapped in cotton and wool.’110

  Four months later, Renoir suffered his first real battle with rheumatic paralysis. It started in Essoyes on 29 December 1888, with a resurgence of pain in his teeth, as he explained to Georges Charpentier: ‘I am suffering from atrocious dental neuralgia.’111 He began to worry that he would not be able to travel back to Paris or t
o continue painting. In January 1889, to Morisot’s husband, Eugène Manet, he lamented: ‘I am sick: I caught cold in the country, and I have a facial, local, rheumatic etc. paralysis…. In short, I can no longer move a whole side of my face, and for diversion I have two months of electrical treatments. I am forbidden to go out for fear of catching another cold. It’s not serious, I think, but up until now nothing has improved [with my facial paralysis].’112 Soon thereafter he wrote another letter to Eugène: ‘I am having trouble with my eyes, just like Degas.’113 In December 1888, he had written in despair to his dealer: ‘I was thinking of coming back one of these days but my teeth started hurting again. I haven’t slept for several days. I’m not suffering at the moment, but half of my head is swollen and I can’t open one eye. It is impossible for me to eat. What’s going to happen after this? I really can’t travel in the state I’m in…. Tomorrow, I hope my eye will open up and I can finish my paintings.’114 A few days later, he rallied enough to plan to travel and explained to Murer: ‘I’m going to Paris tomorrow or the day after that. I’m very annoyed; I think I have an abscess in my ear. I’m suffering horribly. Write to me at [my apartment] 18 rue Houdon.’115

  Nine months later, Renoir continued to be plagued with bouts of intense pain, which he described to Bérard: ‘I have still been suffering intensely after going to the dentist. Today I am in less pain…. After having suffered like the damned because of my teeth and the hunger caused by their absence, I’m going to have all new teeth and if my health recovers, I’ll return to work.’116 Although Renoir did return to work, his health never recovered. He suffered through multiple tooth extractions and was reduced to eating mashed food or liquids through a straw.117 At this time, when he was forty-eight years old, photographs of Renoir show him as emaciated, frail and aged. His art, however, became even more intensely hedonistic. The voluptuous, serene women of his paintings embraced a sensuality that was shrinking from his life.118 His art, more now than ever before, was his escape and his medicine.