85. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
The Bathers in the Seine, La Grenouillère, 1868.
Oil on canvas, 59 x 80 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
In 1858, Pierre Auguste Renoir turned seventeen years old and he left the Lévys’ workshop. Mechanical methods of reproducing a design on porcelain were being introduced in the larger firms and the Lévys had been driven out of business.
At this time he bought all he needed to work professionally in oils and painted his first portraits. The archives of the Louvre contain a permit issued to Pierre Auguste Renoir in 1861 to copy paintings in the museum. Finally, in 1862 Renoir passed the examinations and entered the École des beaux-arts and, simultaneously, one of the independent studios, where instruction was given by Charles Gleyre, a professor at the École des beaux-arts. This event opened a new chapter in the artist’s life. Gleyre’s studio was situated on the Left Bank and Renoir took lodgings close by, making one more corner of Paris his. The second, perhaps even the first, great event of this period in Renoir’s life was his meeting, in Gleyre’s studio, with those who were to become his best friends for the rest of his days and share his ideas about art. The appearance of Claude Monet in Gleyre’s studio could not go unnoticed. This young man from Normandy looked like an aristocrat despite the fact that he rarely had even a sou in his pocket. He shocked his fellow-pupils, contemptuously calling them épiciers (grocers). Boldness, self-assurance, a free way of talking to people and the free manner of his painting made Claude Monet the unquestioned leader of the group of friends. In Renoir’s portraits, Monet is depicted working in the open air, reading a newspaper or overtly posing. And Renoir alone succeeded in conveying to posterity the charm of this independent personality. While studying under Gleyre, the group usually gathered at the Closerie des Lilas. The café remained a favourite place for artists until the middle of the twentieth century. The twenty-year-old Bazille, Renoir, Monet and Sisley argued heatedly about the new Renaissance in which they were to take part. Here they were joined by Camille Pissarro, who was not taking lessons from Gleyre. Bazille had met him at Manet’s and brought him to the Closerie des Lilas. “There were even calls to burn the Louvre, which did not in the least, as the old Renoir said, prevent them from remaining diligent pupils of Gleyre. As with every artist, Renoir’s passions in art altered with age, but from childhood the Louvre remained for him something unassailable. “It is in the museum that people learn how to paint,” he said. “I often argued about that with some of my friends who put up against me the absolute preferability of working outside, among nature. They disparaged Corot for reworking his landscapes in the studio.” (Albert André, Renoir, Paris, 1919, p. 34).
Much later, when he was no longer young and already a mature artist, Renoir had the opportunity to see the works of Rembrandt in Holland, Velázquez, Goya and El Greco in Spain, Raphael in Italy. His encounter with each of the Old Masters brought him joy. At that time, however, when the friends gathered at the Closerie des Lilas and Renoir lived and breathed ideas of a new kind of art, he always had his own inspirations in the Louvre. “For me, in the Gleyre era, the Louvre was Delacroix,” (J. Renoir, op. cit., p. 113). In Delacroix’s painting Renoir probably saw some kindred aspect, something particularly close to himself. Undoubtedly it was colour, as it was for all his friends, but perhaps he sensed more strongly than the others that elemental force in the painting, that impetuous flow of colour, which fascinated him too. The years between 1863 and 1874 might be called the “plein-air decade” in Renoir’s biography, because it was at that time that the future Impressionists mastered this “outdoor” style of painting. Renoir was still short of money. Life in Paris was not easy, but he did have friends. With no permanent home of his own in Paris, he sometimes lived with Monet, sometimes with Sisley. Bazille, who was better-off than the rest, did not abandon Renoir, Monet and Sisley. He was the one who paid the rent on the studio where they all worked together.
In 1867 Bazille wrote to his mother of his delight at being able to have as guests in his home such talented artists as Monet and Renoir. Renoir himself, as yet without a family, was not downcast by not having a place of his own. The geographical scope of Renoir’s movements at that time was not particularly large – he had no money to travel far – but there were enough attractive motifs in the area around Paris. The more so, since it was on them that the Barbizon school had developed and Renoir and his friends felt themselves to be its direct successors as landscape painters. The Forest of Fontainebleau provided an inexhaustible stock of subject matter. Renoir and his friends acquired their own favourite places. Sometimes they lived in the village of Chailly-en-Bière, at the Auberge du Cheval Blanc run by Père Paillard; even more often in their especially beloved Marlotte, with Madame Mallet, or at the inn run by Mère Anthony. They all went out to paint a motif together – Monet, Bazille, Sisley, Pissarro and Renoir. Often Edmond Renoir accompanied them.
86. Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Sisleys (The Fiancés), c.1868.
Oil on canvas, 106 x 74 cm.
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne.
87. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
At the Inn of Mother Anthony, 1866.
Oil on canvas. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
88. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
A Waitress at Duval’s Restaurant, c.1875.
Oil on canvas, 100.3 x 71.4 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
About 1866 Renoir depicted that same inn in the striking painting At the Inn of Mother Anthony.The scene Renoir recreated on a large canvas, about two metres high, was not invented. That was how it was when they all gathered at Marlotte. “In the picture painted at Mère Anthony’s,” Jean Renoir tells us, “you can recognise Sisley in the standing figure, and Pissarro in the one with his back to you. The clean-shaven character is Frank Lamy; in the depth of the scene, with her back to you, is Madame Anthony; in the left foreground is the serving-girl Nana.
From this moment on, Renoir’s friends became regular features of all his paintings. The colour scheme of his work had still not become impressionistically light. It is more reminiscent of the bituminous tones of Courbet or the brownish hue of Fantin-Latour’s group portraits that makes them like old nineteenth-century photographs. The construction of the painting is remarkable, though: the figures of the servant-girl and the seated gentleman, both facing the viewer and both cut off at the vertical edge of the canvas, and the group of figures disposed almost in a semicircle create the sense of a real space. And that achieved by a twenty-five-year-old artist two years before Manet produced his Luncheon in the Studio. In this period Renoir produced a large number of portraits. It was then more than ever that he painted Monet and Sisley, created his portrait of Sisley and his wife, and another of William Sisley, the artist’s father. Renoir and Bazille painted each other in the studio they shared. Renoir often depicted the artist Jules Le Cœur with whom he became friendly at that time and in whose house he frequently stayed at Marlotte. Researchers into Renoir’s work believe that it is Le Cœur, and not Sisley, who is shown standing in At the Inn of Mother Anthony. Thanks to Le Cœur, Renoir began to get commissions for portraits and this subsequently became his main source of income. And, most important of all, not without the indirect involvement of Le Cœur, Renoir acquired his first muse. The sister of Le Cœur’s young lady, a girl named Lise Tréhot, became Renoir’s girlfriend. Lise did more than just pose for Renoir from 1865 to 1872. She became the first model of that Renoiresque world that the artist began to create. A very young Lise is depicted at her needlework in 1866, in some way calling to mind the models of Vermeer of whom Renoir was fond.
That same year, 1867, he painted Lise with a Sunshade. This plein-air painting, with a soft shadow on the face and the pink tone of the body shining through the thin fabric, has something in common with Bazille’s Family Portrait and Monet’s Women in a Garden, foreshadowing the Impressionist painting that would burst out on their canvases
three or four years later. For Renoir at that time, Lise Tréhot’s face became a yardstick of feminine beauty. Perhaps for that reason, scholars believe that the woman in the portrait of the Sisleys is in actual fact also Lise. In 1870 she appeared in the next large canvas in the guise of a bather with a griffon. The Classical pose of Praxiteles’s Aphrodite of Cnidos (models were often posed that way in the Academic school) does not conceal, but rather accentuates the striking individuality of her face, her luxuriant head of dark hair and the somewhat heavy forms of her body. And the ugly little dog intrudes on the Classical world as such a vivid, homely detail that Renoir’s painting comes across as nothing other than a theatrical performance. Perhaps Renoir had potential as a theatrical director, which he himself did not recognise, because later his paintings seemed to take the form of staged scenes from life.
In 1870 Renoir painted Odalisque. He dressed Lise in fine silk and oriental brocade glittering with gold embroidery. He adorned her splendid black hair with an orange plume and surrounded her with magnificent carpets.
On 18 July 1870, normal life was interrupted when France declared war on Prussia. Fate decreed that Renoir, who did not know the first thing about horses, was sent to the cavalry. He found himself in Bordeaux, then Tarbes. The captain’s daughter was interested in painting. Renoir gave her lessons and at the same time made portraits of her. The idyll ended unhappily, however. Renoir fell seriously ill and the doctors in the Bordeaux hospital only just managed to save his life. In March 1871, he was demobilised and returned to Paris – to the Latin Quarter, where before the war he had rented an apartment together with Bazille, and later with the musician Edmond Maître, who was also a lover of painting. It was there that he learned of Bazille’s death – a shock which affected him more deeply than the war itself. The story of Renoir the cavalryman had its continuation in his painting. In 1872 he produced Riders in the Bois de Boulogne. The woman who posed for the magnificent Amazon was Madame Darras, the wife of Captain Darras, whom Renoir had met through the Le Cœurs. The boy on the pony was Charles Le Cœur’s son. The painting’s enormous dimensions – each side of the almost square canvas extends to about two and a half metres – turn it into a monumental work. Renoir told Ambroise Vollard that he had worked on the painting in the grand hall of the École Militaire, something that Captain Darras had arranged for him. There are two purely Renoiresque aspects to the painting. First, he was unable to resist the charm of a Parisienne “whose skin does not reflect light”, the elegance of the black veil and the rose pinned to the black suit. Second, the painting’s fairly light palette harmoniously linked the figures in the foreground with the landscape. Still missing here are the blinding sun and the red reflexes on water, but the softness of the golden trees in the background and the calm surface of the lake assert the proposition promulgated by the future Impressionists: there is no need to travel far in order to capture living nature; it exists in the very heart of Paris. Renoir had as yet only taken the first step in that direction: his painting still retained an overall warm tone. Subsequently, though, events began to develop rapidly. The painting was rejected for the Salon. It was displayed at the Salon des Refusés organised in 1873 behind the Grand Palais. This probably dispersed Renoir’s illusions about his possibly achieving a compromise with the official Salon.
Finally, the association of artists about which Bazille and Pissarro had already been dreaming in the late 1860s came about. Nevertheless, the organisers managed to bring together twenty-nine artists who presented 165 works. Edmond Renoir was responsible for the catalogue and so, indirectly, for Louis Leroy, a critic writing for Le Charivari, coining the contemptuous word “Impressionism”. Edmond asked Claude Monet to change the uninspiring title he had given to one of his landscapes, as a result of which it became Impression. Even in old age, Renoir recalled with bitterness: “The only thing that we gained from that exhibition turned out to be the label ‘Impressionism’ which I hate!” (J. Renoir, op. cit., p.173). Renoir displayed six oil paintings and one pastel. Viewers’ attention was drawn by the large canvases: Dancer, Parisienne (or Lady in Blue) – for which Henriette Henriot, an actress at the Odéon Theatre, posed, and The Loge (which was also called L’Avant-Scène). In his memoirs, Georges Rivière informs us that between 1874 and 1880 Renoir’s usual model was the pretty blonde Nini, a serious and modest girl. In the painting in question she became the archetype of the Renoir portrait: no allusions to her social status, character or mood – only the delight of porcelain skin, slightly painted lips and an elegant dress, only the transient charm of the Parisienne. For the first time in this painting, a wave of light, harmonious, unrestrained colour broke across Renoir’s canvas in conjunction with a composition worthy of the lessons provided by Classical teachers. Yet the framework of diagonals in the strict pyramidal construction is not immediately striking: it is concealed by the large figures advanced towards the viewer. La Loge arouses vague associations with Caravaggio’s compositions, and even stronger ones with Manet’s Balcony. Renoir absorbed ideas and influences and then resolutely followed his own path.
89. Pierre Auguste Renoir, Jules Le Cœur and his Dogs,
Walking in the Forest of Fontainebleau, 1866.
Oil on canvas, 106 x 80 cm.
Museu de Arte, São Paulo.
90. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Parisiennes in Algerian Costume or Harem, 1872.
Oil on canvas, 156 x 128.8 cm.
Matsukata Collection, National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo.
This period in Renoir’s life was marked by one further significant event. In 1873 he moved to Montmartre, to the house at 35 Rue Saint-Georges, where he lived until 1884. Renoir remained loyal to Montmartre for the rest of his life. Here he found his plein-air subjects, his models and even his family. It was in the 1870s that Renoir acquired the friends who would stay with him for the remainder of his days. One of them was the art-dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who began to buy his paintings in 1872. Renoir said that “père Durand” was a courageous and honest man and that without him the Impressionists would not have survived. More than once he was on the brink of ruin, but he did not let them down. And even when Durand-Ruel was unable to buy paintings due to lack of money, he gave Renoir a certain sum every month.
In summer, Renoir continued to paint a great deal outdoors together with Monet. He would travel out to Argenteuil, where Monet rented a house for his family. Édouard Manet sometimes worked with them too. At Argenteuil Renoir also made the acquaintance of Gustave Caillebotte, a marine engineer and neighbour of Monet, who painted in his spare time. Not only did Caillebotte become a close friend of the Impressionists, he also supported them financially by buying their paintings. The collection of works which Caillebotte bequeathed to the nation formed the basis of the present-day Musée d’Orsay. At an unsuccessful sale that Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Berthe Morisot organised at the Hôtel Drouot in 1875, Victor Choquet, an official with the Customs administration, bought his first paintings by Renoir. Among Renoir’s closest friends in the 1870s and 1880s were also Georges Rivière, an official at the Ministry of Finance, who later wrote the book Renoir et ses amis, and one other civil servant, Lestringuez, who was preoccupied with occult sciences and hypnotism.
The 1870s in Montmartre were possibly the happiest time in Renoir’s creative biography. The little neglected garden by the studio on the Rue Cortot that he began renting in 1875 became the plein-air setting which generated the finest paintings of this period. Here he worked on Summer House, The Swing and Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre – one of the most important paintings he ever produced. Renoir found the subject for this last work right by his house, on the Rue Cortot, in the restaurant called Le Moulin de la Galette. It is more of a motif than a subject: Renoir’s canvases never did have a subject as such, since any kind of narrative or descriptiveness in painting was repugnant to him. A certain Monsieur Debray turned the last windmill still standing on the hill into a restaurant. It got its name from the tasty gal
ettes (flat cakes) which it served.
On Saturday evenings and Sundays, shop assistants, seamstresses, young artists, writers, actresses and simply light-hearted girls from Montmartre would gather here to dance. Renoir told Jean that he had sat there for hours at a time, absorbing the special aroma of the Moulin de la Galette. With the help of a little stratagem – introducing himself to the girls’ parents – he persuaded them that it was safe to pose for him. It was in Montmartre too that he discovered Anna, who featured in many of his paintings; Angèle, who helped him to rent the garden with the swing that then appeared in The Swing; and finally, Margot, whom we see for the first time in Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, dancing with the tall Spaniard Don Pedro Vidal de Solares y Cardenas, another of the artist’s acquaintances. Margot later posed for a whole number of paintings.
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