—— ' • •' —- HIS PAINTINGS ' • ' —— ___--—-— PAINTINGS BY RENOIR . "3 •1 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART RENOIR A SPECIAL EXHIBITION OF HIS PAINTINGS NEW YORK At Fifth Avenue and Eighty-second Street MAY 18 THROUGH SEPTEMBER 12 1937 COPYRIGHT BY THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART MAY, 1937 5r * ^ cn> £ LIST OF LENDERS LUCIEN ABRAMS THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO DR. AND MRS. HARRY BAKWIN D. W. T. CARGILL MRS. HUGUETTE M. CLARK STEPHEN C. CLARK RALPH M. COE MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM W. CROCKER MRS. CHARLES SUYDAM CUTTING MRS. MURRAY DANFORTH MRS. ABRAM EISENBERG MARSHALL FIELD FOGG ART MUSEUM WALTHER HALVORSEN CHARLES B. HARDING MISS HELEN HAYES MR. AND MRS. HUNT HENDERSON MME EDOUARD L. JONAS MRS. RALPH KING MR. AND MRS. PAUL LAMB THE ADOLPH LEWISOHN COLLECTION MRS. R. S. MAGUIRE MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM G. MATHER HENRY P. MCILHENNY THE MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ARTS MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON ROBERT TREAT PAINE 2ND PHILLIPS MEMORIAL GALLERY EDWARD G. ROBINSON MRS. MARTIN A. RYERSON ARTHUR SACHS MRS. WESSON SEYBURN STANLEY W. SYKES MRS. MYRON C. TAYLOR CARROLL S. TYSON, JR. JOHN HAY WHITNEY MISS GERTRUDE B. WHITTEMORE J. H. WHITTEMORE COMPANY JOSEPH E. WIDENER MR. AND MRS. JOSEPH WINTERBOTHAM THREE ANONYMOUS LENDERS PREFACE Pierre Auguste Renoir was one of the most influen­ tial and prolific of the great masters of the nineteenth century. In arranging an exhibition of his paintings to last throughout the summer, the Museum hopes to give to students and the wider public an opportunity to study and enjoy at leisure Renoir s work through forty-five years of his life—from 1871, when he painted the Por­ trait of Mme Darras, to 1916, the year of the Femme nue couchee. To gather together so comprehensive a collection, and to show it for so long a period, we have had to ask no inconsiderable sacrifice on the part of collectors and other museums, and for their generous response, the Metropolitan Museum makes grateful acknowledgment. The names of the lenders are listed on the two preceding pages. H. E. WINLOCK, Director CONTENTS PA GE List of Lenders v Preface, by H. E. Winlock vii Contents ix The Painting of Renoir, by Harry B. Wehle 1 Illustrations 11 Index 81 THE PAINTING OF RENOIR THE PAINTING OF RENOIR "According to my idea," Renoir once remarked, "a picture ought to be a lovable thing, joyous and pretty, yes, pretty. There are enough boring things in life with­ out our fabricating still more." Renoir was gifted with a species of profound and humorous common sense peculiar to the Frenchman of the petite bourgeoisie. He had little use for the drab realism of Zola's writings and early lost his taste for Courbet's blunt statements. Gustave Moreau's bejeweled, exotic unrealities sick­ ened him beyond tolerance. He liked to dwell upon the earth with its richness and its delights. The ancient Greeks he found to be the most admirable of beings. Their existence on earth was happy—so happy that they imagined it was there, to their earth, that the gods descended to find paradise and to make love. Yes, he maintained, the earth was the paradise of the gods, and that paradise was what he proposed to paint. But it was seldom simply the earth that Renoir 2 THE PAINTING OF RENOIR painted. The earth, to be sure, is ever present in his pictures, an earth aquiver with happy sunlight, tremu­ lous green trees, dancing blue waters, and gardens rosy with flowers. It was to the inhabitants of the earth that Renoir especially devoted himself, and the inhabitants he delighted in were never the gods of the ancients, for the gods after all were of a passionate and cruel race, whereas it was "the placid and docile kind of woman," the young woman of his everyday life, that Renoir liked to paint. Early in his career (1866-1867) he painted a Diana of the Chase, a splendid figure of a nude woman in Courbet's style to which he added the attributes of Diana as an afterthought. When late in his career (1908) he painted a Judgment of Paris, the glorious goddesses turned out to be no goddesses at all but Mme Renoir's buxom maid, Gabrielle, all over again. She had even posed for the figure of Paris. As the world has at last come to realize, Renoir was one of the truly great artists. As such his innate genius controlled the main direction he was to take, but the factors in his environment which helped him to reach his goal were many. The theory is probably valid that his boyhood years, devoted to commercial china paint­ ing, had a lasting effect on his style. It may have been in the porcelain factory that Renoir developed his pas­ sion for pure, transparent color. The learned critic Jacques Emile Blanche remarked how clean Renoir THE PAINTING OF RENOIR 3 kept his palette. He first saw Renoir's paintings about 1883 hanging in the same room with some of Cezanne's works in Choquet's house and contrasted Renoir's light, transparent, oily, and flexible paint with Cezanne's dense and opaque material. After the introduction of machine decoration had driven him out of the china factory and before he en­ tered into Gleyre's studio to become a regular painter, Renoir worked at decorating fans and window shades or awnings. For his designs he leaned heavily on the motives of Boucher, Watteau, and Fragonard. He al­ ways felt himself the heir to the French painters of the eighteenth century. One day in the lunch hour he "dis­ covered" the same gay spirit and expert design ex­ pressed sculpturally in Goujon's Fountain of the Inno­ cents, which delighted him by its solid form and its purity, naivete, and elegance. In Gleyre's studio Renoir met Sisley and Claude Monet, whose use of pure, broken color to produce effects of light Renoir soon adopted. Little is known of his work between 1862 and 1866, for he destroyed most of what he painted. But his portrait of Mile Romaine Lancaux (1864) is splendidly painted, and so is the Courbet-like Diana. Some of his paintings of the late sixties are rendered with broad brush strokes and show figures in the dappled shade of trees, the dependence being apparently upon Manet rather than Monet. Le 4 THE PAINTING OF RENOIR Pont Neuf a Paris (no. 2),* painted in 1872, is still much in the manner of Monet and Pissarro. It tran­ scribes in the Impressionist technique the light of a cool, bright day with firm little clouds floating in a brittle blue sky. But Renoir's color in those days was affected by Delacroix too. The rich tone of the Portrait of Mme Darras (no. 1) should be accredited partly to the example of this fiery colorist. The important Parisiennes habillees en Algeriennes is a frank adapta­ tion of Delacroix. Among Renoir's most noted paintings are the two which were greeted with derision when they appeared in the first exhibition of the Impressionists (1874). The exquisite Danseuse (no. 5) because of its subject and its subtle use of grays suggests Degas, but the child's dreamy expression is far removed from Degas's detached vision. The other of these famous paintings is La Loge (Courtauld collection), the daring and satis­ fying qualities of which are seen in a smaller repetition (no. 6). Renoir used to be considered an "auteur difficile," and was the last of the Impressionists to be understood. The explanation may lie in his preoccupation with color and light, which caused him to avoid definite con­ tours and solid surfaces. His paintings of about the *The sixty-two paintings in the exhibition are illustrated in their chronological order. All are in oil on canvas. THE PAINTING OF RENOIR 5 year 1875—Mme Choquet en blanc (no. 9), Mme Henriot en travesti (no. 10), La Fillette attentive (no. 11), and Une Servante de chez Duval (no. 13)—ap­ pear to eyes of today as quiet, refined, unexceptionable, though the artist is various enough and always alert for the individual charms of his subjects. The endearing Two Little Circus Girls (no. 15) is also in this compara­ tively reticent style. The full glory of Renoir's color and the dazzle of his light are heralded in the gay sketch Dame en toilette de ville (no. 12), in the brilliant scene At the Milliner's (no. 18), and especially in the rich enchantment of Au Moulin de la Galette (no. 16), of which a larger ver­ sion is in the Louvre. Here we seem to experience with the artist an intuition of the concept that light, color, and even matter exist only as vibration. Here, in this new and luminous style, Renoir expresses his spirit fully for the first time. Here, as in his famous paintings La Balancoire (Louvre), After the Concert (Barnes Foundation), and The Umbrellas (National Gallery, London), he paints his Parisian friends en plein air, intelligent enough young people who have left their intelligences at home while they disport themselves elsewhere. They are happy folk, joyous even, but never without decorum. Their interest in one another is airily free from consciousness of self and from strong desire. The girls are simple and warmhearted young creatures, 6 THE PAINTING OF RENOIR their eyes wide apart like kittens'; the men are relaxed and contented, able to take care of themselves. Renoir has indeed made his corner of Paris, with its holiday places near by, into a paradise fit for the gods. In his Canotiers a Chatou (no.