VI

AUGUSTE RENOIR AND HIS WORK


The work of Auguste Renoir extends without interruption over a period of
forty years. It appears to sum up the ideas and methods of Impressionist
art so completely that, should it alone be saved from a general
destruction, it would suffice to bear witness to this entire art
movement. It has unfolded itself from 1865 to our days with a happy
magnificence, and it allows us to distinguish several periods, in the
technique at least, since the variety of its subjects is infinite. Like
Manet, and like all truly great and powerful painters, M. Renoir has
treated almost everything, nudes, portraits, subject pictures, seascapes
and still-life, all with equal beauty.

His first manner shows him to be a very direct descendant of Boucher.
His female nudes are altogether in eighteenth century taste and he uses
the same technique as Boucher: fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy,
laid on with the palette knife, with precise strokes round the principal
values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those
of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the
opposition of the shadows; and, finally, vivacious attitudes and an
effort towards decorative convention. Nevertheless, his _Bathers_, of
which he has painted a large series, are in many ways thoroughly modern
and personal. Renoir's nude is neither that of Monet, nor of Degas,
whose main concern was truth, the last-named even trying to define in
the undressed being such psychologic observations as are generally