Pierre-Auguste Renoir

• 1. Introduction

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  Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted the portrait of the composer Richard Wagner in just thirty-five minutes. It was the 15th of January 1882, and Wagner received the young Frenchman at his home in Palermo, Sicily. That speed was not carelessness. It was the distillation of a life spent learning to see. How did a tailor's son from Limoges become one of the defining painters of his age? What drove him from porcelain factories to the banks of the Seine, from the studios of Paris to the galleries of Rome? And what kept him painting when his hands could barely hold a brush?

• 2. A Tailor's Son

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  Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, on the 25th of February 1841. His father, Leonard Renoir, worked as a tailor of modest means. By 1844, the family had relocated to Paris, settling in rue d'Argenteuil in the heart of the city, a short distance from the Louvre. The boy showed a natural inclination for drawing, but his singing voice was the talent that first attracted serious attention. His teacher Charles Gounod, who served at the time as choirmaster at the Church of St Roch, recognized something exceptional and encouraged the gift. The family's finances, however, made music lessons impossible to sustain. At thirteen, Renoir left school and took up an apprenticeship at a porcelain factory. The factory's owner spotted his aptitude and passed word to the family. That recognition set Renoir on a path toward formal art study, leading him to prepare for entry into the Ecole des Beaux Arts. When the factory switched to mechanical reproduction processes in 1858, the apprenticeship ended. Before enrolling in art school, Renoir supplemented his income by painting decorations on fans and producing hangings for overseas missionaries. He entered Charles Gleyre's studio in Paris in 1862, and it was there that he met Alfred Sisley, Frederic Bazille, and Claude Monet.

• 3. Poverty, Paint, and the Salon

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  During the 1860s, there were stretches when Renoir could not afford to buy paint. He first showed work at the Paris Salon of 1864, but recognition arrived slowly. The painting that brought his first real success was Lise with a Parasol, completed in 1867, which depicted Lise Trehot, his lover at the time. It was shown at the Salon of 1868. Recognition was further slowed by the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War. A vivid incident from 1871 illustrates the dangers of that period. While Renoir painted along the banks of the Seine during the Paris Commune, a group of Communards mistook him for a spy and prepared to throw him into the river. A leader of the Commune, Raoul Rigault, intervened, having recognized Renoir as the man who had protected him on an earlier occasion. In 1874, the loss of a friendship that had lasted ten years brought a quieter but equally significant change. When his relationship with Jules Le Coeur and his family ended, Renoir lost the use of their property near Fontainebleau, a favorite location for painting the scenic forest. That loss pushed him toward new subjects.

• 4. The Impressionist Years

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  Renoir drew early inspiration from the colorism of Eugene Delacroix, the luminosity of Camille Corot, and the realism of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet. Edgar Degas's command of movement also left a clear mark on his thinking. He and Monet, working side by side in the late 1860s, made a shared discovery while painting light and water outdoors: the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of surrounding objects, a phenomenon now known as diffuse reflection. Pairs of paintings survive from that period in which both artists depicted the same scenes, including La Grenouillere in 1869. After the Salon juries rejected his work repeatedly, Renoir joined Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and others to stage the First Impressionist Exhibition in April 1874. Renoir showed six paintings, and while the critical response to the exhibition as a whole was largely hostile, his work fared comparatively well. Two of his paintings were also shown that same year with the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in London. At the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, he focused on portraits, hoping to attract commissions that would provide a reliable income. The Third Impressionist Exhibition, the following year, saw him contribute a broader range of work, including Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette and The Swing. That 1876 painting of the dance garden on the Butte Montmartre, crowded with figures in dappled outdoor light, became one of the most recognized works associated with the Impressionist movement. By the close of the 1870s, his painting Mme Charpentier and her Children, shown at the Salon of 1879, had made him a fashionable success.

• 5. The Crisis of Italy

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  In 1881, Renoir traveled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugene Delacroix, then on to Madrid to study Diego Velazquez, and then to Italy, where the work of Titian in Florence and Raphael in Rome shook his confidence in his own direction. Standing before those Renaissance masters, he concluded, in his own words, "I had gone as far as I could with Impressionism and I realized I could neither paint nor draw." That assessment led to what became known as his "Ingres period," a stretch of years when he tightened his drawing, sharpened outlines, and pursued a more severe classical discipline. Works from this phase include Blonde Bather, painted in 1881 and again in 1882, and The Large Bathers, completed between 1884 and 1887 and now housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. While working in Montmartre during this period, he employed Suzanne Valadon as a model. She posed for The Large Bathers and Dance at Bougival, painted in 1883, and while sitting for Renoir and other painters, she studied their methods closely. Valadon went on to become one of the leading painters of her generation. After 1890, Renoir changed course again. He returned to thinly brushed color, dissolving outlines as he had in his earlier Impressionist work, and concentrated on monumental nudes and domestic scenes. Girls at the Piano, painted in 1892, and Grandes Baigneuses, completed in 1887, stand as examples of his late style.

• 6. Family and the Later Years

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  Aline Victorine Charigot, a dressmaker twenty years younger than Renoir, had already served as a model well before he married her. She appears in the 1881 painting Le Dejeuner des canotiers, playing with a dog at the left of the composition. Renoir married her in 1890. The household grew to include three sons. Pierre Renoir, born in 1885, became a stage and film actor. Jean Renoir, born in 1894, became a filmmaker of lasting reputation. Claude Renoir, born in 1901, became a ceramic artist. Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. By 1907, the disease had progressed enough that he moved to a farm called Les Collettes in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer in Provence, close to the Mediterranean coast, in search of a warmer climate. His hands became progressively deformed, and ankylosis set in at his right shoulder, forcing him to adapt his technique. Reports that he had a brush strapped to paralyzed fingers in his final years are, according to the record, erroneous; he retained the ability to grip a brush, though an assistant was needed to place it in his hand. The bandages visible in late photographs served to protect against skin irritation. Despite these constraints, he continued painting for the last two decades of his life. For large works, he relied on a moving canvas, or picture roll, to compensate for his limited range of movement. In his final years, he collaborated with a young artist named Richard Guino to produce sculptures, directing Guino's hands to work the clay. A portrait of the Austrian actress Tilla Durieux, painted in 1914, shows playful flecks of vibrant color on her shawl that offset the classical formality of her pose, offering evidence of his undiminished eye just five years before his death.

• 7. Legacy and the Final Visit

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  In 1919, Renoir made a visit to the Louvre to see his paintings displayed alongside works by the old masters. He died at Cagnes-sur-Mer on the 3rd of December 1919, at the age of 78. The single largest collection of his work, 181 paintings in total, is held by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. A small version of Bal du moulin de la Galette sold for $78.1 million at Sotheby's New York on the 17th of May 1990. In 2012, his painting Paysage Bords de Seine was withdrawn from auction after it was identified as the work stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951. The five-volume catalogue raisonne of his output, with one supplement, was published by Bernheim-Jeune between 1983 and 2014. When Renoir was asked in his later years why he continued to paint through the pain of advanced arthritis, he answered, "The pain passes, but the beauty remains." His great-grandson Alexandre Renoir became a professional artist, and in 2018 the Monthaven Arts and Cultural Center in Hendersonville, Tennessee, mounted an exhibition of his work under that title, Beauty Remains.