Famous Paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Opinions about the immensely popular paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir have been divided since he started exhibiting them in Paris more than a century ago.

When the aspiring artist, then 27, showed a painting of his plump mistress at the official Salon of 1868, a mischievous cartoonist ridiculed her as “a nice semisoft cheese out for a stroll.” Less than a decade later, the novelist-critic Emile Zola gushed over Renoir’s harmonious colors, comparing him to Old Master painters Rubens and Velazquez.

Since Renoir produced nearly 6,000 paintings in a 50-year career that continued until shortly before his death in 1919 at age 78, the quality of his work is inevitably uneven. The sweetness of his gauzy scenes might make you gag, or it might seduce you with its charming illusion of a bygone world of languorous lunches and dance-hall flirtations.

In a show opening today, the Art Institute of Chicago is scrutinizing one previously unexamined aspect of Renoir’s prolific output: portraits. Organized by the Chicago museum along with the National Gallery of Canada, “Renoir’s Portraits” presents about 70 paintings spanning more than 50 years.

The famous “Luncheon of the Boating Party” from the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., is included, although it is hardly a traditional portrait. Its presence is justified by the fact that the pert young woman cooing to a puppy is the young Parisian dressmaker and artist’s model whom Renoir married in 1890. The “Luncheon” was not shown in Ottawa, where the exhibition debuted in June, nor will it be seen at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, where the show will be presented next year.
Renoir has always been the odd man out among those rebellious talents labeled the Impressionists. He aspired to recognition in art’s most conventional field, portrait painting, while his more adventuresome colleagues were pioneering new approaches to light, color and subject matter.

For 20 years starting in the mid-1860s, Renoir supported himself mainly as a portraitist, courting potentially influential sitters by volunteering to paint them for the cost of canvas alone.

On several occasions he lobbied hard to have his portraits included in the official Salon, the annual showcase of new art that other Impressionists often snubbed (usually after the Salon had first snubbed them).

As curator Colin Bailey notes in his exhaustively researched exhibition catalog (Yale University Press, $55 hardcover, $29.95 paper), Renoir even involved his clients in elaborate shenanigans to assure his inclusion in the Salon. He sent them to solicit the loan of paintings owned by their friends, bootstrapping his way up the social register by seeking introductions to richer, better-connected clients.

Sometimes these ambitious schemes backfired. A satisfied Renoir patron introduced the painter to an important banking official. But the banker “declined to have the artist paint his portrait because his prices were too low,” Bailey notes.

Portraiture was a natural avenue of advancement for a working-class painter such as Renoir, the son of a tailor and a dressmaker. His family moved from Limoges to Paris, where he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter at age 13. He painted fans, window blinds and furniture before enrolling in the art studio of Charles Gleyre. There he fell in with a crowd of young artists that included Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille, all soon to be prominent Impressionists.

One of the Chicago show’s charming curiosities is a painting of 43 of the students from Gleyre’s atelier, including Renoir, who is depicted with cadaverously gray skin, unkempt hair and an intense expression.
Renoir’s early portraits share some of the intensity his colleagues evidently saw in him. One of the most fetching is an 1864 portrait of “Mademoiselle Romaine Lacaux,” the 9-year-old daughter of Paris manufacturers. Unusually pretty and poised, she is seated before a white curtain that frames her dark hair and luminous skin.

By contrast, a harsh flatness and brusque impatience in Renoir’s 1869 portrait of his father reveal a stern fellow with furrowed brow and ruddy nose above thin, pursed lips. Because they seem candid rather than flattering, these early portraits are more memorable than many of Renoir’s later works.
One of the Chicago show’s surprises is an immense 1873 painting called “Riding in the Bois de Boulogne.” Nearly 10 feet tall by about 8 feet wide, it depicts two fashionable figures galloping through a woods - a woman riding side-saddle wearing a veiled top hat, and a boy beside her on a rearing pony. The riders’ beautifully modeled figures are as striking as the silvery, gray-green tones that visually link the horses to the landscape.

But the painting suffers the same compositional weaknesses that mar even such acclaimed Renoir masterpieces as “Boating Party.” The figures are out of scale, bear no relationship to each other and appear pasted onto the landscape. By the time he painted “Boating Party” in 1880-81, Renoir’s palette was brighter and he had learned how to use color to distract the eye from his irksome inability to choreograph crowds convincingly.

Even in “Boating Party,” however, many of the figures look like extras auditioning for parts in unrelated scenes. At the same table, they fail to make eye contact.

By about 1890, Renoir was financially secure enough so that he rarely undertook a commissioned portrait. However, he continued to paint family members and friends, sometimes posing his children in improbable costumes.

Both Jean Renoir and his younger brother, Claude, were pressed into service as clowns, Jean swaddled in an immense white clown suit in 1901 and poor Claude stuffed into a puffy red-balloon outfit for a huge 1909 portrait. Jean reappears in boots and hunting togs for a 1910 portrait with Bob, the family’s amiable mutt, which looks much too sleepy to fetch a ball, let alone retrieve a bloody bird.

By the time he died, Renoir had outlived most of his Impressionist colleagues and, like his friend Monet, who died seven years later in 1926, had become a legend in French art. Crippled by rheumatism, Renoir used a wheelchair after 1912, but continued to paint and even took up sculpture.

Picasso called him “the pope,” and modeled some of his own classic nudes of the 1920s on the fleshy goddesses Renoir turned out in his final years. Tourists pestered Renoir at his home outside Nice in southern France. “The whole swarm of faithful bores from Paris descended upon him,” Renoir’s dealer recalled.

Although photos confirm that Renoir’s portraits resemble his sitters, he idealized and flattered them just as lavishly as did John Singer Sargent and other fashionable portraitists of the era. Furthermore, the Chicago show suggests how extensively Renoir relied on conventional portrait poses, seating his figures in front of generic drapery with their hands clasped, doing needlework or petting small objects or animals.

Such colleagues as Edgar Degas and the American painter Mary Cassatt used unusual angles, off-center poses and vigorous brushwork to give an edge to their portraits. Renoir preferred static poses and a nervous, fuzzy brushwork that swaddled his subjects in the kind of haze that portrait photographers today achieve by smearing camera lenses with Vaseline.

Renoir’s muzzy generalities - and the fact that his subjects evidently had identical, heavy-lidded brown eyes set into boneless bodies, evidently pleased Renoir’s sitters and have charmed generations of viewers, but they make these portraits very cloying indeed to my eye.