Renoir is remembered as the painter of happy Sundays, sunlit cafés and pink cheeks. It is easy to forget how hard he had to fight for them. A critic said his colors looked like rotting flesh, the French state bought nothing from him until he was 51, and in old age his hands stiffened around the brush. The twelve pictures below cover fifty years of his work, from 28 to 78.
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Skin, Light and the People He Knew
Renoir painted people more than places. Friends lingering at a long meal, models found in the street, a publisher's wife, an acrobat who later became a painter herself: nearly every canvas he made is filled with someone he knew, caught at leisure.
The problem that held him for fifty years was how to paint skin in light. At first he broke it into patches of color. In his forties he closed it inside a firm outline. In his last years he made the two meet.
The twelve run from a riverside summer when he was 28 to the last big canvas he finished, the year he died. They climb from the least familiar to the best known, and each one catches him at a turn: broke, mocked, in fashion, in doubt, or ill.
12. Study: Torso, Effect of Sunlight (about 1875 to 1876)
Patches of violet and blue lie across the woman's chest and shoulder, as if someone had scattered colored glass over her skin. They are sunlight, broken up by the leaves above her. Study: Torso, Effect of Sunlight is a half-length nude set against a wall of green, and Renoir meant it as an experiment.
To see what he was testing, it helps to know what a nude was supposed to look like in those years. The nudes that won medals at the official Salon, the great annual exhibition in Paris, had smooth, even skin, shaded from light to dark like polished marble.
Renoir wanted the opposite. He wanted to show what happens to a body under trees, where the light arrives in pieces and the shadows pick up the green of the leaves and the blue of the sky.
He was 34 or 35, living in Paris, and part of a group of painters who had stopped waiting for the Salon to accept them. In 1874 they had organized their own exhibition. In April 1876 they held a second one, in Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery, and the nude hung there.
That is where Albert Wolff saw it. The most feared critic at Le Figaro, he asked on April 3, 1876, for someone to explain to Monsieur Renoir "that a woman's torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh," and he compared the green and violet spots to the marks on a corpse.
Wolff had looked closely, and he had seen exactly what was there. What he called rot was what Renoir had been after all along: shadows with color in them.
At a Glance
Artist: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919)
Painted: About 1875 to 1876
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 81 x 65 cm (31 7/8 x 25 5/8 in)
Where to see it: Musée d'Orsay, Paris
11. La Grenouillère (1869)
A tiny round island, crowded with people standing around a single tree, floats on the river. In the summer of 1869, two broke painters planted their easels next to each other facing it, at a bathing place on the Seine called La Grenouillère. One was Renoir, 28. The other was his friend Claude Monet. They were looking at the same water, and they did not see the same thing.