91. Pierre Auguste Renoir, Odalisque, 1870.
Oil on canvas, 69.2 x 122.6 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
92. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Under the Arbor at the Moulin de la Galette, 1875.
Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
At the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, Renoir mainly presented portraits, because that was the genre in which he was trying to earn his living. Friends introduced him to people who might commission works from him. The existing small circle of admirers of his art was joined by the financiers Henri Cernuschi and Charles Ephrussi, who began buying his paintings. In 1879, Renoir met the diplomat Paul Bérard, who became another friend and patron. Yet the income generated by the sale of those works was only sufficient to buy the bare necessities of life.
In 1877, at the Third Impressionist Exhibition, Renoir presented a whole panorama of over twenty paintings. They included landscapes created in Paris, on the Seine, outside the city and in Claude Monet’s garden; studies of women’s heads and bouquets of flowers; portraits of Sisley, the actress Jeanne Samary, the writer Alphonse Daudet and the politician Spuller; and also The Swing and Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre. The labels on some of the paintings indicated that they were already the property of Georges Charpentier. The artist’s friendship with the Charpentier family was to play a significant role in shaping his destiny.
Madame Charpentier’s salon was frequented by writers, actors, artists and politicians. Besides Maupassant, Zola, the Goncourts and Daudet, whom Georges Charpentier published, it was even possible to come across Victor Hugo and Ivan Turgenev there. Renoir was a constant caller at the house. He even signed some of his letters to Madame Charpentier, “your domestic artist”. His painting could be seen at the gallery called La Vie Moderne which Georges Charpentier founded. It was in this environment that he found new customers, such as the Bérards and Daudet, who went on to become his friends. Here too he found more models, the finest of whom was the Comédie-Française actress Jeanne Samary. Renoir was so fascinated with Jeanne, that he even became a frequent visitor to the Comédie-Française. In his depictions of the actress, Renoir achieved what was the finest quality of his portraits – complete naturalness. Renoir produced much work to commissions from the Charpentiers themselves. He painted two decorative panels on which he depicted the couple meeting guests at the entrance to their house and five portraits of members of the family, one of which was the Portrait of Madame Charpentier and her Children. By pulling strings, Marguerite Charpentier managed to get this canvas accepted for the 1879 Salon together with a formal portrait of Jeanne Samary. For Renoir this meant success and the promise of new commissions. From that point he stopped taking part in the Impressionist exhibitions. At the Seventh Impressionist Exhibition, held in 1882, Renoir was again represented with twenty-five works, but that was on the initiative of Paul Durand-Ruel, who made the paintings that he owned available. Renoir was so dubious about some of the artists included in the exhibition that he hastened to send Durand-Ruel a telegram from Estaque in the south of France. “Those paintings of mine in your possession are your property. I cannot prevent you from doing what you want with them, but I am not the one who is exhibiting them.” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 120).
93. Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Swing, 1876.
Oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
94. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, 1876.
Oil on canvas, 131 x 175 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
95. Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Loge, 1874.
Oil on canvas, 80 x 63.5 cm.
Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London.
96. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Young Woman Seated (Thought), c.1876-1877.
Oil on canvas, 66 x 55.5 cm.
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.
By 1882, Renoir really did have good cause to fear losing the success that he had achieved in the Salon. Now he had a wife to support. The story began a little earlier, in about 1880. Her name was Aline Charigot and in 1880 she was twenty-one years old. Renoir met her in Madame Camille’s dairy shop on the Rue Saint-Georges. She lived close by with her mother and earned her living by dressmaking. Like Renoir, Aline occasionally visited the shop, where it was possible to get a cheap lunch of soup with cheese for dessert. The owner of the shop had hopes of marrying one of her own daughters to the artist, but fate decided otherwise. The mutual attraction between Renoir and Aline was impossible to overlook. In terms of outward appearance, Aline was a striking match for the female type which Renoir had created in his work. But in her Renoir found much more: simplicity and sincerity, which had not been lost in the move from her native village of Essoyes to Paris, calm, consideration and an understanding of the significance of the artist’s work, all of which he badly needed. Renoir did find cause to worry, though – not so much on account of Aline’s mother’s disapproval at her romance with an impoverished artist, as because of his awareness of the difference in their ages. Renoir was so tormented by doubt that he did something quite uncharacteristic of him: he left Paris on a long journey, hoping to rid himself of thoughts of Aline.
In the period 1881–82 Renoir moved about many times from place to place, perpetuating them in his work mainly in the form of landscapes. He continued to paint on the Seine, at Chatou and Bougival. His habit of working in those places was so dear to him that he turned down the critic Théodore Duret’s invitation to make a trip to England. “The weather’s set fair and I have got models. That is my only excuse.” (F. Daulte, Pierre Auguste Renoir. Figures (1860-1896), Lausanne, 1971, p. 45). Perhaps the true reason was Aline – Renoir was just on the point of finishing Luncheon of the Boating Party where she appears: she is depicted in the bottom left-hand corner of the canvas, in a fanciful, fashionable hat, holding a Pekinese in her hands.. Yet in that same year, 1881, Renoir (together with his friend Cordey) visited Algeria for the first time, bringing back Banana Plantation and Arab Holiday. After a short stay in Dieppe, he set off for Italy. He travelled through Milan, Venice and Florence. “I saw Raphael in Rome,” he wrote to Durand-Ruel. “It’s truly splendid and I should have seen it sooner. Everything is full of mastery and wisdom. He did not seek the impossible, like I do. I like Ingres better for oil painting, but the frescoes are delightful for simplicity and grandeur… Italy is beautiful. But Paris… o, Paris…” (L. Venturi, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 117). In May 1882, Renoir returned to Paris, with Aline still on his mind. He wrote to her and she met him at the station.
97. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary, 1877.
Oil on canvas, 56 x 47 cm.
The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
In 1883 Durand-Ruel organised Renoir’s first one-man show on the Boulevard de la Madeleine. It included seventy paintings. Although Durand-Ruel was not always successful in his attempts to sell the Impressionists’ paintings, he decided to open another gallery in New York. Finally, in the 1880s Renoir hit a “winning streak”. He was commissioned by rich financiers, the owner of the Grands Magasins du Louvre and Senator Goujon. His paintings were exhibited in London and Brussels, as well as at the Seventh International Exhibition held at Georges Petit’s in Paris in 1886. Renoir was never inclined to overestimate himself.
In the 1880s he travelled extensively. Renoir often painted in the towns and on the beaches of Normandy. He visited the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey with Aline and Paul Lhote. In the winter of 1883 Renoir travelled around the Riviera with Claude Monet.
In the autumn 1884, the Renoirs travelled to Aline’s native village, Essoyes in Champagne. The artist frequently made sketches of his wife feeding their child. A year later he used these sketches to produce the painting Motherhood (Aline and Pierre). In Renoir’s creative life the
1880s were not so serene. It seemed to him that he did not know how to paint or to draw. In a state of depression, he destroyed a whole group of finished works. At this difficult moment, it was Ingres who came to Renoir’s assistance – that very Ingres who had been scorned by Renoir’s circle during his youth.
In Renoir’s artistic biography, the 1880s are customarily called the Ingres period. A tendency to stricter draughtsmanship, precise line and clear form, and even to a greater use of local colour can be traced in all the paintings of that time. To some extent they can already be detected in Luncheon, and more so in Motherhood (Aline and Pierre) and The Umbrellas. This last work, painted in two stages – started in 1881 and completed in 1885 – is astonishing evidence of the way in which the artist’s manner of painting evolved. It is fairly soft and Impressionistic on the right-hand side, it is far tougher and more laconic on the left. In Normandy in 1884, Renoir painted a portrait of Paul Bérard’s three daughters: Children’s Afternoon at Wargemont. Apart from the Ingres-like purity of line and form, this large painting also has one quality unique to Renoir’s way of working in this period. Its pink and pale blue palette calls to mind the painting of the Rococo, of the eighteenth century which figured largely in Renoir’s dreams.
98. Pierre Auguste Renoir, Dance in the City, 1883.
Oil on canvas, 180 x 90 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
99. Pierre Auguste Renoir, A Girl with a Fan, c.1879-1880.
Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm.
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown.
100. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
The Dance at Bougival (detail), 1883.
Oil on canvas, 181.9 x 98.1 cm.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
He was thinking specifically of Fragonard and Watteau, whose works he had loved since childhood, since the time when his greatest dream was to paint porcelain at the Sèvres factory. In 1885, Renoir painted the large composition In the Garden, which became a kind of farewell from him to the “perpetual holiday” of La Grenouillère and the Moulin de la Galette. The quivering of touch, the vibration of light and shade were left behind. In Renoir’s new painting everything was calm and stable. The bright light intensifies the green of the leaves and the reflexes from the bouquet of flowers on the yellow straw hat. Again his model resembles Aline, but now it is already that new Aline who embodies the peace of his family life. The Renoir family were constant visitors to the village of Essoyes. It was at Essoyes in 1888 that he painted The Washer Women, with a colour scheme that again calls the eighteenth century to mind. The inclusion of three-year-old Pierre in the painting made it one more testimony to Renoir’s family idyll.
On 14 April 1890, Pierre Auguste Renoir officially registered his marriage to Aline Charigot in the mairie of the 9th arrondissement. While he changed apartments and studios many times, Renoir hardly ever moved outside Montmartre. Now he installed his family high on the slope of the hill, in the house at 13 Rue Girardon which was known as the Château des Brouillards. This name preserved the memory of a long-demolished eighteenth-century château on the site of which several houses had been built. Renoir’s three-storey house had an attic converted into a studio. Roses and a fruit-tree grew in the garden. But the best thing about the place was the view. It was here, in 1894, that the future film-director was born, the second son of Auguste and Aline Renoir. He was christened in Saint-Pierre, one of the oldest churches in Paris. It stood on the crest of the hill, a twelfth-century remnant of the monastery that once existed here.
Life in Montmartre at that time was still simple, like in a village. Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, even Cézanne, with whom Renoir enjoyed a strong and enduring friendship, were rarely seen in Montmartre. Renoir did maintain special contacts with Berthe Morisot and her family, so that the female Impressionist’s death in 1895 was a great loss for him. “Berthe Morisot,” Jean tells us, “made my father a posthumous present in the shape of Ambroise Vollard. She guessed that that strange character was a genius in his own way…” (J. Renoir, op. cit., p. 336). He came to Renoir himself. Vollard became Renoir’s dealer, friend and biographer.
Among the other friends Berthe Morisot “bequeathed” to Renoir was the writer Stéphane Mallarmé. He once addressed a letter to Renoir, then living in the Rue Saint-Georges, in the following way: A celui qui de couleur vit au trente-cinq de la rue du vainqueur du dragon, porte ce pli, facteur (“To the man who lives by his paints at number 35 on the street of the Dragon-Slayer, postman, convey this missive.”) (J. Renoir, op. cit., p. 390). Surprisingly perhaps, the letter was indeed delivered to Renoir, who had become an inseparable part of Montmartre. Renoir’s health was never strong. Reading through his letters, you continually come across references to bronchitis and pneumonia, which kept him in bed for long periods at a time. A bout of neuralgia at Essoyes in 1888 left him with one side of his face paralysed, and in 1897 he suffered a real misfortune. On a rainy summer’s day at Essoyes he fell off a bicycle and broke his right arm. The artist began to be troubled by pain and the Renoirs’ family doctor did not console him with his accounts of the incurable kinds of arthritis brought on by such injuries. Renoir was condemned to spend the last twenty years of his life in constant suffering, aware that he was threatened with complete immobility that would mean an end to his work.
101. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Luncheon of the Boating Party, c.1880.
Oil on canvas, 129.7 x 172.7 cm.
The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
102. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Children’s Afternoon at Wargemont, 1884.
Oil on canvas, 127 x 173 cm.
Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Those last twenty years, most of them belonging to a new century, also brought great joys. In 1901, Aline gave Renoir a third son, Claude, who replaced the growing Jean as a model. Now little “Coco” was put in a red dress and Renoir painted his golden hair, while Jean’s eventually had to be cut to prevent boys making fun of him. In 1900 Renoir was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and in 1911 an officer. A whole series of exhibitions were held in Paris, New York and London, turning into a real triumph for Renoir. The artist was especially delighted by a retrospective showing of his painting at the Second Salon d’Automne in 1904, where he was accorded an entire hall. He displayed his work there alongside the young artists – Bonnard, Vuillard, Valtat, Roussel and Matisse – who not only had become his successors in painting, but also surrounded him during the final years of his life.
In this period the family lived by turns in Paris, on the Boulevard Rochechouart; on the Mediterranean coast; and in little villages in the south of France, trying to find the place with the climate that suited Renoir best. Finally, they came to rest in the village of Cagnes. Renoir told Jean that there was nothing more beautiful in the world than the reeded valley of the little River Cagne. Despite the artist’s illness, the house was always full of life. Friends did not shrink from the train journey so as to come and see him. Renoir could be pushed on rails made especially for his chair out into the garden where he painted.
103. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Young Girls at Piano, 1892.
Oil on canvas, 116 x 90 cm.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
104. Pierre Auguste Renoir, Child with a Whip, 1885.
Oil on canvas, 105 x 75 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.
105. Pierre Auguste Renoir,
Motherhood (Aline and Pierre), 1886.
Oil on canvas, 74 x 54 cm. Private Collection.
106. Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Washer Women, c.1888.
Watercolour, 21 x 17,1 cm.
The Baltimore Museum of Arts, Baltimore.
107. Pierre Auguste Renoir, The Judgement of Paris,
c.1913-1914.
Oil on canvas, 73 x 92.5 cm.
Musée d’Art, Hiroshima.
The main idea running through the last years of Renoir’s work was the
creation of a large painting with nude figures, coming close to a wall-painting. As far back as 1887 he had painted The Large Bathers in the somewhat austere Ingres-inspired manner of those years. “Right now, when I no longer have arms or legs, I would like to paint large canvases,” he told the young artist Albert André, who became a very close friend of the family in those final years. “I am dreaming only of Veronese, of The Marriage at Cana!… How terrible!” (A. André, op. cit., p. 28).
In 1908, at Les Collettes, he painted against the background of the evergreen olive trees his first version of The Judgment of Paris (above), a work which he subsequently not only repeated, but also turned into a relief with the help of sculptors.
In 1914 the Great War began and the artist’s two elder sons went off to the front. This event proved too much for Aline – she died within the year, leaving Renoir alone. Pierre and Jean came back wounded, but life, nonetheless, settled back into an established pattern. Renoir continued to work, but every day it became harder. He died of pneumonia at Les Collettes on 2 December 1919, after managing to finish his last work, a still life with anemones. All his life, he remained the way he had always been, true to himself.
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