admirable painter of children. His strange colouring and his gifts of
grasping nature and of ingenuity--strangers to all decadent
complexity--have allowed him to rank among the best of those who have
expressed childhood in its true aspect, without overloading it with
over-precocious thoughts. Finally, Renoir is a painter of flowers of
dazzling variety and exquisite splendour. They supply him with
inexhaustible pretexts for suave and subtle harmonies.

[Illustration: RENOIR

WOMAN'S BUST]

His third manner has surprised and deceived certain admirers of his. It
seems to mix his two first techniques, combining the painting with the
palette knife and the painting in touches of divided tones. He searches
for certain accords and contrasts almost analogous to the musical
dissonances. He realises incredible "false impressions." He seems to
take as themes oriental carpets: he abandons realism and style and
conceives symphonies. He pleases himself in assembling those tones
which one is generally afraid of using: Turkish pink, lemon, crushed
strawberry and viridian. Sometimes he amuses himself with amassing faded
colours which would be disheartening with others, but out of which he
can extract a harmony. Sometimes he plays with the crudest colours. One
feels disturbed, charmed, disconcerted, as one would before an Indian
shawl, a barbaric piece of pottery or a Persian miniature, and one
refrains from forcing into the limits of a definition this exceptional
virtuoso whose passionate love of colour overcomes every difficulty. It
is in this most recent part of his evolution, that Renoir appears the
most capricious and the most poetical of all the painters of his
generation. The flowers find themselves treated in various techniques