Painted pleasure: Renoir

The ideal Renoir is a unique vision of the sunny side of life, where rosy cheeked young girls, nude or otherwise, tease the eye of the beholder in perfect summer weather. But a trademark can also signify a loss - and Renoir can, in some people’s minds, deteriorate into kitsch, although the modernists did take him on board and approved of his painterly qualities.

No other artist has ever succeeded in clothing the human form so extravagantly with gorgeous colours, and few other painters could catch, as Renoir does so wonderfully, at the fleeting moment.
You find it with his paintings that he made during the summers of the 1860s of La Grenouillere (or “The Frog Pond”). Both Renoir and Monet spent much time in those years at Bougival on the banks of the Seine painting at La Grenouillere, an outdoor amusement centre much favoured by milliners, shopgirls and jack-the-lad clerks.

They, along with other Parisian young people went out to Bougival looking for a bit of fun at weekends, something that was helped by the opening up of the French railway system.
Here were to be found the amply proportioned doe-eyed young women that Renoir doted on. They were not prostitutes exactly, but simply girls who changed lovers frequently and who “would swap a mansion on the Champs-Elysees for an attic room in Batignolles without batting an eye”, writes Adriani, in an authoritative and beautifully produced book which extends and informs what we already know of Renoir with enthusiasm and affection.

Adriani links Renoir to Watteau, his predecessor, whose fetes-galantes, set around the French court are reflected in Renoir’s paintings of popular resorts and pleasure gardens in which he took such delight.

Renoir did not paint figures in a court masque - he did not come from that social class. Rather, he painted his contemporaries waltzing, out of doors at the Paris balmusettes where the accordion and string band sent the summer nights along with a swing until the dawn came in.

He painted rowers at lunch during a boathouse party, or a woman lolling on a swing over grass dappled with sunlight.

Bonnard once said, “Renoir created a wonderful universe for himself. He worked from within his own nature and had the capacity to take a model or a light that at times seemed dull and then imprint it with the memory of thrilling moments.”

And Renoir - a conventional family man - was not above declaring his credo, which was briefly that a painting should be both cheerful and pretty. “Yes, pretty,” he said, “life brings enough unpleasantness why not approach it from the light side once in a while?”

Fascinatingly enough, in old age, when his poor hands became hideously knotted with rheumatism, so that the brushes had to be tied in place to allow colour to be applied to the canvas, there was evidence of a sharply critical mind which was based upon experience and was certainly not the waspishness of a crotchety old man.

Matisse remembered taking along some of his canvases for Renoir’s critical comments. They were not as reassuring as they might have been. Matisse commented: “He regarded them disapprovingly. Finally, he said: ‘Well, to tell you the truth I don’t like what you paint. I would almost want to say that you are a bad painter. But something keeps me from saying that. All my life I have been saying that black is not a colour. You use black and it sticks, and that is why I believe that you are a painter after all. You see, it is very hard to understand the next generation and judge it properly, and it becomes more difficult to judge a painting whose point of departure lies beyond ones own final destination.”

Renoir had little patience with the extremes of the European avant-garde. He had no wish to make things ugly only to record the beautiful, something which brought criticism from those who believed art should serve to illuminate social injustice and socialist creeds thus eschewing the chocolate box look.
Yet Renoir was above all else a painter of the ordinary people of Paris, giving them a stature and a grandeur that transcended the social conditions which life had handed out to them.

In the boating party painting he turned his subjects into gods and goddesses and when he came to paint the Durand-Ruel brothers, Charles and Georges in 1882, sitting on a bench in summer weather at their home near Dieppe, he gave these young men the elegance and nobility of Renaissance princes by old masters who he adored.

Adriani discusses the palettes Renoir used and notes that they changed as the painters hands became more crippled. “His completely stiffened fingers, barely able to hold a brush, swept with ever-increasing lightness across the canvas, bringing forth a finely woven fabric of colour structures in delicate transparent touches which tended increasingly towards red, balanced by a deep blue that reveals the immeasurable effect of southern skies.”

Renoir reacted to his diminishing powers after 20 years of martyrdom to pain, by painting bodies full of vitality and sensuality - the greater the pain writes Adriani, the greater became the old painter’s faith in the indestructible harmony of nature.

The first biography of Renoir was actually written by Julius Meier-Graefe and appeared in 1911. But in 1914, Meier-Graefe made his final visit to Renoir on the day after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

The writer found the old artist slumped in his wheelchair looking like Titian’s (1489-1576) portrait of Pope Paul III.

Asked what he thought of the assassination which would hasten the First World War, the old man could give no reply, since the war, which was imminent, would inevitably destroy the carefree world he had known and painted so often.

Renoir’s last wish four years later, when he was wasted by suffering, was to be taken to the Louvre. The old artist wanted to see his gods - Titian, Rubens and Veronese - for one last time - these were the men who, all his life, were his companions. His remarks in that particular context are filled with wisdom.

“What wonderful artisans those people were. They were masters of their craft! And therein lies the secret - painting is not for daydreamers. It is above all, a craft. But everything has been turned upside down.

“Painters delude themselves into thinking they can change the face of the world by using blue instead of black, whereas I believe today that I am only continuing what others before me have done much better than I.”

Such modesty was his hallmark and it could almost be his epitaph.