Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Pleasure Taken Seriously

Across two summers in 1880 and 1881, on the terrace of the Maison Fournaise at Chatou, Renoir assembled fourteen people around a table of stripped oysters and half-drunk wine. His future wife Aline Charigot plays with a terrier. The painter Gustave Caillebotte straddles a chair backwards. There is an actress, a banker, a poet, a cavalry officer and the restaurateur's son. *Luncheon of the Boating Party* is a group portrait, a still life and a landscape fused into a single canvas, and it remains the most persuasive argument ever made that ordinary happiness is a fit subject for major art.

From Limoges to the Porcelain Bench

He was born on 25 February 1841 in Limoges, the son of Léonard, a tailor, and Marguerite, a seamstress. The family moved to Paris in search of better prospects. At thirteen he was apprenticed to a ceramics workshop, painting decorative motifs onto fine china — an education in flat, bright, decorative colour that never quite left his easel work. Then machine technology arrived and destroyed the trade. He took free art classes in the evenings, learned oil painting after hours, and from 1860 supported himself copying pictures in the Louvre.

It is worth pausing on this. Renoir was not a bohemian who chose poverty as a posture. He was a working-class craftsman displaced by industrialisation who found his way into painting through the tradesman's door.

Gleyre's Studio and the River

In the studio of the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille and Claude Monet; through Monet came Pissarro, Degas and Cézanne. Bazille shared a studio with him in 1865 and covered most of the expenses. The Salon accepted *La Esmeralda* in 1864 — Renoir later destroyed it — then a landscape and portrait in 1865, then a portrait of his lover Lise Tréhot in 1867.

The decisive summer was 1869, when Renoir painted for two months alongside Monet at La Grenouillère, a bathing spot on the Seine. Two men set up beside each other and worked at the same water, the same boats, the same dappled light. What came off those easels — broken touches of pure colour standing for reflections rather than describing objects — is as close to a birth certificate as Impressionism has. The Franco-Prussian War interrupted everything; Renoir served, caught dysentery, and was posted to a cavalry unit at Bordeaux.

The Impressionist Years, and the Exit

In April 1874 he showed six works in the first Impressionist exhibition and sold two. An auction of Impressionist work in 1875 flopped. *Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette* (1876) caught a Montmartre courtyard on a Sunday afternoon in shifting patches of sun and shadow that critics found illegible.

Then he walked away. Renoir withdrew after 1877 and refused to take part in the 1878 exhibition, doubting the group's durability and turning instead to portrait commissions, which paid. It was the first sign of a temperament often mistaken for placidity: he was, in fact, restless, and repeatedly abandoned a manner the moment it started to feel automatic.

Italy and the Sour Style

In 1881 he travelled to Algeria and was overwhelmed by North African light. Later that year he toured Italy, painted Richard Wagner in Sicily, and came home enamoured of Raphael and Pompeii. "The trouble with Italy is that it's too beautiful," he complained. "Why bother to paint, when there's so much pleasure."

What followed is the most contested decade of his career. Renoir hardened his contours, tightened his drawing and produced crisply outlined figures in what the French call his *manière aigre* — his sour or dry manner. *Reclining Nude* of the mid-1880s and the great bathers belong to this reckoning with the classical tradition. He worked with Cézanne at L'Estaque; he suffered pneumonia in 1882. By the 1890s he had synthesised the two impulses — Impressionist colour with sculptural form — in canvases such as *Two Young Girls at the Piano* (1892).

A Late Household

Aline Charigot became his model and mistress in 1881; they married in April 1890. Pierre arrived in March 1885, Jean — later one of the greatest of all film directors — in September 1894, and Claude, called Coco, in 1901. In 1895 the family took a large house at Essoyes, buying it later, while keeping the Paris flat.

Recognition finally arrived. The French state bought *Young Girls at the Piano* for the Musée du Luxembourg in 1888. He was offered the Légion d'honneur in 1890 and refused it, accepted it in 1900, and by then his pictures were fetching roughly double those of other Impressionists. Exhibitions in London, Berlin and Boston had begun in 1883. The tailor's son from Limoges died wealthy.

Painting Against the Body

The first symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis appeared in December 1888, when he was forty-seven. The disease governed the last three decades of his life. He moved south, bought Les Collettes at Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1907, suffered a stroke in 1912, recovered enough to paint again, and increasingly worked from a wheelchair. Unable to model clay himself, he took up sculpture by directing the hands of a young assistant, Richard Guino.

The war took the rest. Both Pierre and Jean were conscripted in 1914 and badly wounded; Aline died of a heart attack after visiting them in hospital. Renoir went on painting nudes, portraits such as *Tilla Durieux* (1914), and warm-toned landscapes until pneumonia killed him at Cagnes on 3 December 1919.

Why Pierre-Auguste Is Called a Genius

The specific faculty was chromatic — an almost physiological sensitivity to how coloured light behaves on skin, cloth and water, and the technical means to put it down without killing it. Renoir could make flesh read as warm and occupied rather than as pigment. "I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it," he said. In *Luncheon of the Boating Party* he did something almost nobody manages: fourteen individually characterised figures, a still life and a river landscape held in one coherent design without any of the three defeating the others. Duncan Phillips, who bought it in 1923, said it would do "more good in arousing interest and support" for his gallery "than all the rest of our collection put together."

The counter-case has force. Renoir was an intuitive, not a theorist, and he said so with a bluntness that has embarrassed his admirers: "I think a picture should be a delightful thing, happy and pretty — yes, pretty!" That creed, and the vast decorative popularity it produced, has led serious critics to file him below Monet, Degas and Cézanne — a maker of agreeable surfaces who flinched from difficulty. His late nudes in particular have been faulted as repetitive and boneless, and his treatment of women as objects of appetite reads very differently now than it did in 1900. His mid-career doubt, when he abandoned Impressionism for a dry classicism, is read by some as courage and by others as a decade of misdirection.

Legacy

He is among the most reproduced painters who has ever lived, which is both his achievement and the reason he is patronised. Strip away the biscuit tins and what remains is a craftsman who taught European painting how sunlight moves across a human face, and who insisted — against the whole modern current toward anguish — that delight is not a lesser truth about being alive.