[Footnote K: _Renoir_. Par Albert André. Crès et Cie.]
Renoir is the greatest painter alive. [L] There are admirers of Matisse
and admirers of Picasso who will contradict that, though the artists
themselves would probably agree. Also, there are admirers of M.
Bouguereau and of Sir Marcus Stone, there are Italian Futurists and
members of the New English Art Club, with whom one bandies no words.
Renoir is the greatest painter alive.
[Footnote L: This essay was written in 1919. He died in 1920.]
He is over forty: to be exact, he is seventy-seven years old. Yet, in
the teeth of modern theories that have at least the air of physiological
certainties, one must admit that he is still alive. A comparison between
the five-and-thirty photographs reproduced by M. Besson and those at the
end of Herr Meier-Graefe's monograph suggests that even since 1910 his
art has developed. But what is certain is that, during his last period,
since 1900 that is to say, though so crippled by rheumatism that it is
with agonizing difficulty he handles a brush, he has produced works that
surpass even the masterpieces of his middle age.
Renoir was born in 1841, and in '54 bound prentice to a china-painter. A
fortunate invention deprived him of this means of livelihood and drove
him into oil. He escaped early from the École des Beaux-Arts, and, of
course, came under the influence of Courbet. By 1863 he was being duly
refused at the Salon and howled at by the respectable mob. He thus made
one of the famous _Salon des Refusés_, and has, in consequence, been
generally described as an "Impressionist." It is an honour he neither
desires nor deserves. The pure doctrine of Impressionism, as formulated
by Claude Monet, enjoins "scientific truth" and submission to Nature,
whereas Renoir observed one day to an astonished disciple, "Avec la
Nature on ne fait rien"; and on being asked where, then, the student
should learn his art added, without any apparent sign of shame or sense
of sin--"Au musée, parbleu!"
Renoir thus affirmed what every artist knows, that art is the creation
and not the imitation of form. In his eyes the most valuable part of an
artist's education is the intelligent study of what other artists have
done. For his own part he studied Courbet and then Delacroix, and,
assuredly, from these picked up useful hints for converting sensibility
into significant form. Sensibility he never lacked. Renoir's painting
gift may, without unpardonable silliness, be compared with the singing
gift of Mozart. His conspicuous characteristics are loveliness and ease.
No painter, I suppose, gives more delight, or gives it more frankly.
That is why his name provokes an odd, personal enthusiasm in thousands
of people who have never seen him. That is why Frenchmen, who have
sometimes a terribly intimate way of explaining themselves, have been
known to assert that they feel for Renoir the sort of grateful affection
that every sensitive man feels for a woman who has given him joy.
But Renoir's natural masters--parents one would say if a man could have
more than two--were Fragonard, Boucher, and Watteau. These, two of whom
he has surpassed, with Rubens, whom he almost equals, are responsible
for most of what is derivative in his art during his first great period
(1870-1881). That this should be the period beloved of amateurs does not
surprise me. It is the period of _Mme. Maître_ (1871), _La Loge_ (1874),
_Moulin de la Galette_ (1876), and _M. Choquet_--"portrait d'un fou
par un fou," Renoir calls it--pictures of ravishing loveliness to set
dancing every chord in a spectator of normal sensibility. Also, it is a
period that has an extraordinary charm for the literary connoisseur. It
throws glamour over the "seventies," and, for that matter, on to the
"eighties." Here are the characters of Flaubert and Maupassant as we
should wish them to be. That _déjeuner_ by the Seine was probably
organized by the resourceful Jean de Servigny, and there, sure enough,
is Yvette with a fringe. The purest of painters becomes historical by
accident. He expresses the unalloyed sensibility of an artist in terms
of delicious contemporary life and gives us, adventitiously, romance. A
fascinating period, but not the great one.
Towards the end of 1881 Renoir set out on a tour in Italy, and, as if
to show how little he was affected by what he found there, painted
at Naples a large and important _Baigneuse_ (now in the Durand-Ruel
collection) in which I can discover not the slightest trace of Italian
influence. He is too thorough a Frenchman to be much of anything else.
The emphatic statement and counter-statement of the great Primitives
is not in his way. He prefers to insinuate. Even in his most glorious
moments he is discreet and tactful, fonder of a transition than an
opposition, never passionate. The new thing that came into his art about
this time, and was to affect it for the next twenty years, was not Italy
but Ingres.
The influence was at first an unhappy one. During three or four years,
unable, it seems, to match the new conception of form with his intensely
personal reaction, Renoir produced a certain number of unconvincing and
uncharacteristic pictures (_e.g._, the dance series, _Dance à la Ville_,
etc.). There is an uneasy harshness about the contours, the forms are
imperfectly felt, they are wooden even, and in their placing one misses
the old inevitability. Signed with another name these essays might by
a dashing critic be called doctrinaire. Then in 1885 came the first
_Baigneuses_ (collection J.E. Blanche), whereby Renoir put himself a
good head above all contemporaries save Cézanne. If this picture were
hung in a public gallery, and the numerous drawings made for it ranged
alongside, how finely discredited would be those knowing ones who, in
their desire to emphasize the difference between form and that of which
form is composed, are in the habit of calling Renoir a great colourist
and then pausing impressively. I suppose it is because he rarely uses a
lead pencil that the wiseacres are able to fulfil their destiny. Drawing
in charcoal or pastel need not be taken seriously; while drawing with
the brush is apparently not drawing at all. That Renoir is a great
draughtsman may be inferred from almost everything he has ever done. But
(though that amazing _Boy with a Cat_ was achieved as early as 1868) it
is the work of this period--and _Les Baigneuses_, with its attendant
studies, are capital examples--that makes patent his mastery and
entitles him obviously to a place between Ingres and Daumier.
That it should be difficult to find a date for the beginning of Renoir's
last period does not much trouble me; but I am sorry that it is quite
impossible to indicate in words its character. One can say confidently
that the new conception was being elaborated between 1895 and 1900; one
can suppose that its final character was to some extent imposed on the
master by his growing infirmities. A painter who can hardly move arm or
fingers will neither sweep nor wiggle. He must paint, if he is to paint
at all, in blobs and smears and patches and soft strokes; and it is
out of these that Renoir's latest works are built up. "Built up"--the
expression is absurd. Rather, it is as though forms had been melted down
to their component colours, and the pool of iridescent loveliness thus
created fixed by a touch of the master's magic--lightly frozen over by
an enchanting frost. Only ice is cold. At any rate, what happens to
the spectator is that first he perceives a tangle of rather hot and
apparently inharmonious tones; gradually he becomes aware of a subtle,
astonishing, and unlooked-for harmony; finally, from this harmony emerge
completely realized and exquisitely related forms. After which, if he
has any sense of art, he remains spellbound and uncritical, and ceases
to bother about how the thing was done. That, at least, is my impression
of Renoir's latest style. Examples of it abound in Paris, notably M.
Maurice Gangnat's collection; and it is said that the artist intends
these pictures to improve by keeping.
In his pleasant, well-written introduction M. Albert André gives a
portrait of Renoir that is almost too good to be true: we are encouraged
to believe just what we should like to believe. It is incredibly
sympathetic. Yet it is very much what we might have guessed from the
pictures had we dared. And, indeed, we did dare--some of us; for,
besides its purely æsthetic character, its French taste and tact, the
art of Renoir has over-tones to which the literary and historical
intelligence cannot choose but listen. An intimate eulogy of France by
a most lovable Frenchman is what, in our lazy moods, we allow these
pictures to give us. They do it charmingly. For instance, though I never
saw a Renoir that could justify a district visitor in showing more of
her teeth than nature had already discovered, here, unmistakably, are
Parisians enjoying themselves in their own Parisian way. Here is the
France of the young man's fancy and the old man's envious dreams. Here,
if you please, you may smell again that friture that ate so well, one
Sunday at Argenteuil, twenty years ago, in the company of a young poet
who must have had genius and two models who were certainly divine. And
that group with the fat, young mother suckling her baby--there is all
French frankness and French tenderness and family feeling without a
trace of its wonted grimness and insincerity.
Renoir is as French as French can be, and he knows it:
Lorsque je regarde les maîtres anciens je me fais l'effet d'un bien
petit bonhomme, et pourtant je crois que de tous mes ouvrages il
restera assez pour m'assurer une place dans l'école française, cette
école que j'aime tant, qui est si gentille, si claire, de si bonne
compagnie... Et pas tapageuse.
Renoir will have his place in that school, but another niche has been
prepared for him amongst an even grander company. When, in 1917, _Les
Parapluies_ (a beautiful but not very characteristic work) was placed in
the National Gallery some hundred English artists and amateurs seized
the opportunity of sending the master a testimony of their admiration
which, rather to their surprise and to their intense joy, apparently
gave pleasure. In this they said:
Dès l'instant où votre tableau s'est trouvé installé parmi les
chefs-d'oeuvre des maîtres anciens, nous avons eu la joie de
constater qu'un de nos contemporains avait pris place d'emblée parmi
les grands maîtres de la tradition européenne.
They said not a word too much.