An Exchange telegram from Paris states that Auguste Renoir, the great French painter, died yesterday at Cannes.
Never was an artistic vocation more certain than that of Pierre Auguste Renoir. Born at Limoges on February 25, 1841, three months after the birth of Claude Monet, he was one of the five children of a small tailor who, when Auguste was three or four years old, went to Paris to make his fortune and only made his position worse by the change. The children had to earn their living, and Auguste at the age of 13 started in life as a painter on porcelain.
He worked at this trade for about five years, and was thrown out of employment by the discovery of a method of decorating porcelain by machinery. He then took to painting window-blinds, and did it so well that in about three years he had saved enough money to enable him to realise the ambition of his life and become a painter of pictures.
Thus, about 1862, Auguste Renoir became a pupil of Gleyre, a painter who had then a considerable reputation, in whose studio he had as fellow-pupils Sisley, Bazille, and Claude Monet, all of whom were destined to be his fellow-Impressionists. His first efforts were painted under the influence of the Romantic school. By 1865 he had already begun to paint directly from life, and he was represented in the Salon of that year by the portrait of a lady and a picture called ╥Une Soiree d╒Ete.╙ About this time he came under the influence of Courbet, which is to be observed in the full-length portrait of a girl in a white dress, holding a sunshine, which he exhibited in the Salon of 1868, under the title of ╥Lise.╙ A little later Renoir╒s painting shows the influence of Manet; a striking example of this is the little picture ╥Dans l╒Herbe,╙ painted in 1873, now the property of M. Claude Monet. An interesting circumstance about this picture is that both Manet and Claude Monet painted the same subject of the same spot at the same time.
The Birth of the Impressionists.
In 1874 Renoir joined with the group of artists afterwards to be known as Impressionists in their first exhibition, held at Nadar╒s, in the Boulevard des Capucines, and shared the general reprobation with which their works were received. Yet his six exhibits included one of his most famous pictures, ╥La Loge,╙ representing a woman and a young man in a box at a theatre, which is now in the collection of Mr. Durand-Ruel. Renoir sent eighteen works to the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876; the pictures that he exhibited at the third exhibition, held in the Rue Le Peletier in the following year, included ╥La Balanoire╙ and the ╥Moulin de la Galette,╙ now in the Caillebotte collection in the Luxembourg. These paintings, like the ╥Lise╙ of 1868, are studies of figures under foliage penetrated by light, but the difference in the treatment is very great. In 1877 Renoir had entirely abandoned the conventional treatment of light and shade; the shade in these pictures is painted in violet toners. This seems natural enough now that everyone recognises that shadows are of all sorts of colours; in 1877 it was regarded much as Cubist pictures are regarded to-day by Royal Academicians.
Meanwhile Renoir, like Sisley and the other Impressionists who had no private means, had a hard struggle for existence; for the first sixteen years, at least, of his career as a painter he was in extreme poverty, but he continued to persevere. It was Charpentier, the well-known publisher, who gave him the opportunity of escaping from penury. Renoir had painted a head of Mme. Charpentier, which was exhibited at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877. Charpentier was so much pleased with it that he commissioned the artist to paint a large-life-sized portrait of his wife and their two little girls. This is the famous ╥Charpentier Family,╙ now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, thanks to the enlightened initiative of Mr. Roger Fry. It is the masterpiece of this period of Renoir╒s art. owing to the personal influence of Mme. Charpentier, this picture and the very fine portrait of the actress Mlle. Jeanne Samary were accepted by the Salon in 1879.
Renoir continued to exhibit at the Salon for several years, but he again appeared at the Impressionist exhibition held in the Rue St. Honore in 1882, when he was represented by twenty-five pictures, and also in that of 1883. Since 1883 he has only once exhibited at the Salon, namely in 1980, when he sent a large picture of the three daughters of the poet Catulle Mendos. In the winter of 1881-2 Renoir had visited Italy, and painted at Venice, Naples, and Palermo; he caught a chill in arriving at Marseilles, and his doctor ordered him to Algiers, where he spent the spring of 1882, and whence he brought back many brilliant paintings of African sunlight.
╥Above All a Colourist.╙
The art of Renoir is divided into two clearly defined periods, with a short interval between them during which he adopted a technique which he soon abandoned. The first period ends in 1885, when was painted the superb ╥Beigneuses,╙ belonging to M. Jacques Blanche. About 1886-7 Renoir painted some pictures strangely unlike the rest of his work, enamel-like in surface, and showing a meticulous attention to detail. This experiment, as has been said, was short-lived, and it was by about 1890 Renoir had found what was his final formula. From that date to his death he merely developed this formula. The pictures of this later period are characterised by greater and greater simplicity, the research of technical precision is entirely abandoned, and the means are completely subordinated to the end, namely the representation of the effect produced on the artist╒s mind by what he sees.
Renoir was above all a colourist, although he was not only that. He was also, without being that exclusively, supremely a painter of women. He made his own one particular type of woman, the Parisian of the ╥midinette╙ or shopgirl class, and he has given her all the charm that, and far more character than, the eighteenth-century painters gave to the great ladies of their period.
Probably it will be the verdict of posterity that Renoir was the greatest painter of the nude of his time; his pictures of the nude are not without sensuality, but it is a sensuality inseparable from art. With all this he has given us landscapes of poetic beauty and paintings of still life, especially flowers, equalled by few artists. Only a genius is capable of such variety as this.
