Are you in love with Renoir’s luminous canvases too?
Perhaps you didn’t know it, but the art of Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born from the meeting of soft colours and bolder brushstrokes. His style, absolutely unique, gives his works a sweetness that reaches even the most critical observer: rosy cheeks, light filtering through the leaves, ordinary people caught in a moment of happiness.
Would you like to know more?
Read on to discover one of the leading figures of Impressionism.
First steps: from Limoges to porcelain
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges in 1841, the sixth of seven children in a modest family: his father was a tailor, his mother a dressmaker. When he was three the family moved to Paris in search of a better life.
His talent for drawing showed early, and as a boy Renoir was apprenticed in a porcelain factory, an almost inevitable trade for a child from Limoges, where he painted flowers and little figures on plates. It was his first school of colour. In 1862 he decided to study painting seriously and entered the studio of Charles Gleyre: there he met Monet, Sisley and Bazille, the friends with whom he would go on to invent Impressionism, painting en plein air in the forest of Fontainebleau.
They were years of real poverty: Renoir couldn’t sell his canvases and at times couldn’t even afford paint. Yet it was on those days outdoors, side by side with Monet, that he perfected the painting of light that would make him famous.
Success and the female portraits
Recognition came in the late 1870s. The great portrait of Madame Charpentier and her children (1878), accepted at the 1879 Salon, launched him among the most sought-after portraitists in Paris, and fame never left him again.
Renoir painted commissioned portraits and female nudes, but what he truly loved were scenes of everyday life (dances, lunches by the water, sunny afternoons), in which he captured all the sensuality, sweetness and beauty of women. He was no intellectual, and he was proud of it: he couldn’t bear Gauguin’s painting and even brushed off Van Gogh’s madness with a quip. His was a painting of joy, not of torment. He put it in his own way:
When I’ve painted a woman’s backside so that I want to touch it, then the painting is finished.
The trip to Italy and the turning point
After selling a few works, in 1881 Renoir set off on a long journey through Italy: Venice, Raphael’s Rooms in Rome, the frescoes of Pompeii near Naples.
As often happens, the trip threw him into doubt and changed him. Before Raphael he became convinced that the Impressionist brushstroke was no longer enough, and for a few years he adopted a more severe style, sharp lines, clean outlines, carefully drawn figures. Critics call it his “harsh period” (or “Ingres period”): a classical interlude before he found, in his final years, the warm colours and softness we love.
Old age, arthritis and the end
Around 1892 Renoir began to suffer from a severe form of rheumatism that turned into arthritis. He spent his last twenty years in the country house of Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the French Riviera, increasingly crippled by the disease.
Arthritis confined him to a wheelchair, but Renoir never stopped painting: it is said that he had the brush strapped to his gnarled hand in order to keep working. He died on 3 December 1919, aged 78. Of his three sons, one, Pierre, became an actor, another, Jean, a great film director, and the youngest, Claude (“Coco”), a ceramist.
Ipse dixit
On the very meaning of art, Renoir left a definition as simple as it is perfect:
Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be indescribable, and second, it must be inimitable.
Where to see Renoir today
The heart of Renoir’s work is in Paris. The Musée d’Orsay holds the celebrated Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876), the Sunday dance in Montmartre you see on the cover, along with the richest collection of his paintings; a short walk away, the Musée de l’Orangerie keeps another group of masterpieces. Many canvases then travel among the world’s great museums, from London to Washington.
If you’re passing through Paris, entry to the Musée d’Orsay is ticketed and the queues are long: book your skip-the-line ticket for the Musée d’Orsay and enjoy the Bal du moulin de la Galette without wasting hours in line.
And you, standing before one of those canvases that seem to hold a sunny afternoon forever, which Renoir would you most like to have in front of you? Let his sweetness win you over: it’s the best way to understand why, more than a century later, we keep falling in love with him.
