Painter's Painter

Seldom in the history of art has any dealer acquired such a strangle hold on the output of an entire school as did canny old Paul Durand-Ruel of Paris with the French Impressionists. Sixty years ago, when most of conservative Paris thought they were madmen. Dealer Durand-Ruel risked his fortune and his artistic reputation on Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Cezanne, Degas, with the result that almost every one of their canvases has passed at one time or another through the firm. The cellars of Durand-Ruel et Cie in Paris and New York still contain untold treasures of their works.

As in other years for other causes, Durand-Ruel et Cie last week fetched up from their cellars and borrowed from old customers nearly 30 canvases, to make the most important showing of the work of the late great Auguste Renoir that Manhattan has seen in many years.

Durand-Ruel picked an ideal moment to exhibit Renoir. Down the street the new Bignou Gallery had just opened with two important Renoirs as the high spots of its first exhibition; and the inventor of Argyrol, the most colorful collector in the U. S., irascible Dr. Albert C. Barnes of Merion, Pa. (TIME, March 26, 1934, et ante), last week published a large, authoritative, opinionated book on Renoir.*

The pictures at the Bignou Gallery were excellent examples of the two styles by which most citizens remember Renoir. La Famille Henriot, painted about 1871, is a gay, sharply drawn canvas of a gentleman and two ladies seated in the dappled shade of a pear tree with two engaging poodles. Judgment of Paris, a swirling study in the pinks, reds, yellows of Paris (in a nightcap) and three rotund nudes, was painted in 1908 when Renoir was already an old man, deeply absorbed in the technique of broken color painting and already wracked with arthritis. The Durand-Ruel pictures were for the most part in Renoir's early manner. Outstanding were a luscious Bather and a self-portrait of the old gentleman in a white duck hat (see cut, p. 44).

Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges in February 1841, died in December 1919 at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France. His first job was painting copies of 18th Century French pictures on fans and window shades for a Paris factory. Before he was 25 he knew most of the men who were to be his lifelong friends and associates in Impressionism: Monet, Cezanne, Sisley, Pissarro, Diaz. He enlisted in the cavalry for the Franco-Prussian war, but nothing happened to him. Very little happened to him all his life. He was a painter's painter, passionately interested in the technique of his craft, with a lusty sensuousness that has caused Collector Barnes to compare him, at great length, to Rubens, Titian, and the 16th Century Venetians. Such a book would have appalled Painter Renoir. He was vitally interested in light, color and human bodies but hated philosophical arguments.

Madame Renoir was wife and business manager combined for the old gentleman. Auguste Renoir's passion for the female nude began to fade when he was nearing 70 and practically paralyzed by arthritis, but Mme Renoir knew that Renoir nudes were what the public wanted. The dimpled housemaids that she hired were used as models between meals.* Occasionally the old gentleman's mind would wander; he would fill the corners of his canvases with exciting studies of vegetables, fruit, flowers. These were carefully cut out.

Auguste Renoir's three sons are all living, moderately prominent. Pierre, the eldest, is a well known actor of the Theatre I'Athenee, despite the paralyzed hand that the War gave him. Jean, the second, is a cinema director, lately produced a well reviewed film of Madame Bovary. Blond Claude, familiar to all art students in dozens of child portraits, is the plump & prosperous owner of the largest cinema in Antibes, L'Antipolis.

Than Renoir, no man more profoundly influenced the group of painters who founded modern painting in the U. S. William J. Glackens has assiduously imitated Renoir most of his life. George Wesley Bellows and Robert Henri adopted Renoir's method of painting coal-black, "shoe-button eyes." Childe Hassam still experiments with Renoir's dappled color.

* The Art of Renoir, by Albert C. Barnes and Violette de Mazia. Minton, Balch ($5). * One, known to all Cagnes-sur-Mer as Lili, married Son Jean Renoir, later became famed as Cinemactress Lili Hessling.

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