Pierre-Auguste Renoir

From porcelain to the Louvre

Renoir was born in Limoges in 1841, the son of a tailor and a seamstress, and grew up in the heart of Paris close to the Louvre with his parents and four brothers and sisters. He started out as a porcelain painter, a trade that trained his hand in fluent brushwork, flowers, and flesh tones years before he touched a canvas. Around 1860 he began copying paintings at the Louvre, and by 1862 he had entered the studio of the academic painter Charles Gleyre and the École des Beaux-Arts.

Gleyre's studio decided the rest. There Renoir met Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, and the four soon painted together in the forest of Fontainebleau. His early nudes took their earthy palette and heavy figures from Gustave Courbet's realism.

One difference from his new friends mattered for decades: Renoir had no family money. Bazille shared his studio; portrait commissions, patrons, and dealer advances were often questions of rent rather than career strategy.

Lise Tréhot and the invention of Impressionism

Around 1865–66 Lise Tréhot became Renoir's companion and his favorite model. She is the figure of Lise with a Parasol, painted life-size in filtered outdoor light and accepted at the Salon of 1868, and she carried his early ambitions through years when the Salon accepted and rejected him by turns. The Musée d'Orsay states the harder fact plainly: the couple had two children they did not recognize, and the relationship, illegitimate by the standards of the time, ended around 1872.

In the summer of 1869 Renoir spent two months painting beside Monet at La Grenouillère, a bathing and boating establishment on the Seine west of Paris. Working the same views in quick, broken strokes and a brightened palette, the two tried to fix the sun on moving water faster than it changed. The Nationalmuseum, which owns Renoir's canvas, counts the paired pictures among the first fully Impressionist works; the Met credits the campaign with catalyzing the movement's aesthetic.

Even here the two friends diverged. Monet increasingly organized pictures around water, light, and atmosphere; Renoir kept the people. From 1873 his studio-apartment on the rue Saint-Georges doubled as a gathering place, and he painted his friends and models there in small canvases built around conversation itself.

Montmartre: the Moulin de la Galette years

Renoir helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874 and sent La Loge, a couple in a theatre box painted in his studio — the model Nini Lopez as the woman lowering her opera glasses, his brother Edmond as the man raising his to scan the audience. Critics argued about whether the woman was respectable. The game of gazes was the point, and the picture established Renoir as one of the leading painters of the group.

In 1876 he rented in Montmartre, then still a working-class village on the northern edge of Paris, taking a studio with a garden at 12 rue Cortot — the site is now the Musée de Montmartre, and its gardens carry his name. The garden gave him The Swing; the dance hall a few streets away gave him Bal du moulin de la Galette, Sunday dancing under the trees painted in dappled light at Salon scale. The Orsay calls it his most important work of the mid-1870s. Contemporary critics read the flickering light on the crowd as blur.

The Bal hung at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, at Paul Durand-Ruel's galerie. Gustave Caillebotte — friend, fellow painter, and the group's richest member — acquired it by 1879, and his bequest carried it into the French national collection in 1896. That exhibition was also Renoir's last with the independents: skeptical that the Impressionist manner could hold up over time, he declined the 1878 show and returned to the official Salon.

Patrons, the Salon, and the Boating Party

Portraiture paid for the independence. Renoir's sitters ran from the radical pastry cook Eugène Murer to Marguerite Charpentier, wife of the publisher Georges Charpentier, whose portrait with her children — informal, intimate, and staged against the family's fashionable Japanese furnishings — was the success of the 1879 Salon and made his reputation with patrons. At the Charpentiers' salon he met the banker Paul Bérard, whose country house at Wargemont became a regular refuge for seascapes, still lifes, and portraits of the Bérard children.

The decade's summation came at the Maison Fournaise, a rowing restaurant on the Seine at Chatou. Luncheon of the Boating Party, painted in 1880–81, fills a balcony table with Renoir's actual circle:

• Aline Charigot, the young seamstress who would become his wife, cooing at her terrier at the left
• Gustave Caillebotte, seated backward in his chair at the right
• Alphonse Fournaise Jr. and Alphonsine Fournaise, the proprietor's son and daughter, at the railing
• the actresses Ellen Andrée and Jeanne Samary, the critic Charles Ephrussi in his top hat, the poet Jules Laforgue, and half a dozen other painters, journalists, and officials of his acquaintance

From time to time, one must try things that are beyond one's capacities.

The Orsay reads the picture as both a manifesto — no one had painted this subject at this scale — and a modern reworking of Veronese's Wedding at Cana. Duncan Phillips bought it in 1923, telling his treasurer he had acquired one of the greatest paintings in the world; it remains the centerpiece of the Phillips Collection in Washington.

The crisis of the 1880s

Success did not settle him. Doubting that Impressionism's dissolved forms could last, Renoir left for Italy in 1881 to school himself, as he put it, in the grandeur and simplicity of the ancient painters. He came back enamored of Raphael and the frescoes of Pompeii, and his figures hardened: crisply drawn, sculptural, set against loosely brushed landscapes, with Ingres's linear odalisques behind the nudes.

The transition produced some of his best-known pictures. In 1883 he painted three near-life-size dancing couples — Dance at Bougival, Dance in the City, Dance in the Country — bringing a decade of strolling, talking, lunching figures together at the moment bodies touch. Aline posed for the country dance; the woman of Bougival and the city dance is traditionally identified as Suzanne Valadon, the Montmartre model whose own painting career began between sittings, and whose portrait Renoir painted around 1885.

The experiment culminated in The Great Bathers, worked over for three years from 1884 to 1887 through dozens of preparatory drawings. Its dry surface and sharply modeled figures deliberately trade the momentary modern subject for something timeless, in the tradition of seventeenth-century French painting rather than anything shown at the independent exhibitions. The critical response was harsh, and an exhausted Renoir never labored over a single canvas that way again. The Umbrellas, painted through the same years of change, was his last major picture of modern urban life and the final full statement of his ideal of a happy modernity.

Family, Gabrielle, and official acceptance

Pierre, Renoir's first son with Aline, was born in 1885; the Orsay marks the birth as a turning point in both life and work. The couple married in 1890, when Renoir was forty-nine. Jean Renoir followed in 1894, and with him came Aline's young cousin Gabrielle Renard, hired as his nursemaid. Gabrielle kept the child still through the sittings — the Orangerie's Gabrielle et Jean series shows her holding his attention with toy farm animals — and stayed on to become one of Renoir's most frequently painted late models. Claude, the youngest, arrived in 1901.

Official recognition came in the same years. In 1892 the state commissioned Young Girls at the Piano for the Musée du Luxembourg, the museum of living artists; Renoir worked through five versions before letting the minister choose. After decades of Salon uncertainty, the purchase settled the question.

The family's circle held its dead close. When Berthe Morisot died in 1895, Renoir took in her orphaned sixteen-year-old daughter Julie Manet for the summer and remained one of her guardians in practice, as Edgar Degas's photograph of Renoir and Mallarmé at Julie's apartment that December records.

The dealers: Durand-Ruel and Vollard

Two dealers carried the career. Paul Durand-Ruel began buying Renoir's work in the early 1870s, before Impressionism had a name or a market, and stayed through the lean years: his galerie hosted the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, where the Bal hung, and he gave Renoir one-man shows in 1883 and 1892. He also commissioned work directly, the three dance panels of 1883 among it, and built the international market for Impressionist painting that eventually reached Renoir's prices too.

Ambroise Vollard arrived a generation later and was dealer, publisher, and cataloguer at once. His 1918 volume of Renoir's paintings, pastels, and drawings was the first attempt at a full record, and museum provenance trails still run through his stock — the Orangerie's Gabrielle et Jean and the National Gallery's portrait of Suzanne Valadon both left the studio through him. It was also Vollard who brought Richard Guino to Renoir and set the sculpture collaboration going.

Arthritis and Les Collettes

Rheumatoid arthritis appeared around 1892, when Renoir was about fifty, and turned aggressive from about 1903. His doctors prescribed the south. Through his painter friend Ferdinand Deconchy he found Cagnes-sur-Mer, above the Mediterranean between Nice and Antibes, and in 1907 he and Aline bought Les Collettes, a farm property planted with old olive trees. The house they built in 1908 had two studios, with a third added later in the garden; the estate is now the Musée Renoir.

The disease deformed his hands and eventually put him in a wheelchair — the museum at Cagnes still has it, beside his easel. The legend that his brushes were tied to his wrists overstates it: photographs and film from these years show the brush placed in his closed hand, with bandages to protect the skin. Within those limits he painted daily, and the work grew warmer rather than smaller — reds and golds, heavy Mediterranean light, and nudes of a monumental amplitude that Mary Cassatt dismissed as 'enormously fat red women with very small heads.'

Younger painters saw something else. Picasso, Matisse, and the sculptor Aristide Maillol admired the late nudes' vision of plenitude, and younger artists made the trip to Les Collettes to see him: a 1918 photograph shows Matisse and Albert Marquet standing beside the seated Renoir in the garden.

Sculpture with Guino, and the last Bathers

At Ambroise Vollard's prompting, Renoir took up sculpture in 1913 through a collaboration with Richard Guino, a young Catalan sculptor who had worked under Maillol. Guino modeled the clay; Renoir directed with drawings, corrections, and a pointer. Vollard's marketing erased the younger man to a nameless pair of hands, and it took a lawsuit brought by Guino's son decades later for French courts to recognize what the working method plainly was: co-authorship. We credit the sculptures to both men.

Aline died in 1915, while Pierre and Jean were both wounded in the war. Renoir kept painting. The last monumental canvas, The Bathers of 1918–19, lays two ample nudes into the olive-grove light of Les Collettes — an Arcadian summation the Musée d'Orsay now hangs as the terminus of his sixty-year run. He died at Les Collettes on 3 December 1919, at seventy-eight.

The afterlife ran in two directions. His late classicism fed Picasso's neoclassical figures after 1917 and the broader return to order in interwar France. And his second son Jean, raised among the canvases and painted a hundred times on Gabrielle's knee, carried the family's eye into cinema — La Grande Illusion and The Rules of the Game are the other Renoir masterpieces, and the shortest bridge from Impressionism to the French New Wave's ancestors.