Renoir once observed, “I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.” And that’s what he does to the National Gallery. There’s wall upon wall of cheerful human interactions in this show — 43 pictures in all — of pleasurable encounters between men and women, dances, boating parties and what feels like several good lunches, or rather the end of lunch when the liqueurs were out and the men were lighting their cigarettes. Among the Impressionists there were some who focused on absinthe, despair and lust; Renoir is one for the kindlier emotions, the pleasures of life.
Yet the self-portrait at the start seems at odds with that cheerful outlook: the young man is strained, haunted. He knew what poverty was; he just chose not to dwell on it. Renoir came from a working-class family.
His mother was a seamstress (he has a keen eye for women’s furbelows) and he himself worked at painting Watteau-style scenes on china, which may have contributed to his view that there was no harm, none at all, in prettiness.
The many splendours of love
The show’s title, Renoir and Love, suggests romantic love, but that’s not all. There’s friendship between men — the portrait of his fellow artist, Frédéric Bazille, is tenderly observed, down to the slippers — and sibling affection, and motherly love (Madame Monet and her young son, say); the excitement of a young girl in a box at the theatre (a subject Renoir made his own) and the conviviality of a dance in a restaurant garden. But the sociable subjects should not take away from the skill in the depiction. The famous Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, Renoir’s local restaurant in Montmartre, shows a garden crowded with dancing couples, with several groups that draw the eye, but it’s structured, not chaotic, with light playing across the scene.
In Paris, this exhibition, with mostly the same pictures, has helped raise Renoir’s reputation; some French critics regarded him as a sub-par Impressionist on account of the sweetness of his subjects and style. But the virtuosity of some of these pictures reminds us how skilled an artist he could be. There are two of his long, narrow, full-length pictures of dancers here — his future wife Aline with a bloke who seems too close for comfort — in a novel treatment of a familiar subject. The real enemy of Renoir’s reputation was, as the critic Robin Simon has pointed out, Renoir himself, in that he churned out so much work it was hard to keep up quality control.
His rapid work can be rewarding. His unfinished oil sketch of Young Girls or his indistinct couple in At the Fireplace are fleeting glimpses of faces and figures that capture a mood and a moment. I’m a sucker for his depictions of flowery meadows and long grass where figures emerge from tangled summer growth, like his Woman with a Parasol. It’s delicious and you know what? Sometimes that’s how it is.
The focus in these pictures is people but we get some nice still lifes by the way. The Luncheon is an affectionate depiction of a couple who plainly like each other but the glasses, the baguette, the silverware get respect too. Ditto the charming scene of a post-prandial cigarette in After the Luncheon (you discern a theme here) — check out the glass, the matchbox, the china.
Joy without judgment
The London show is attractively presented, though the arrangement by theme can confuse the chronology. There’s sometimes over-thinking; the caption for At the
Milliner’s tells us that hat shops were often places for arranging assignations though Renoir isn’t judgmental. But sometimes a milliner’s is just a milliner’s. Ditto the suggestion that two women rowing may be off for a sexual assignation; maybe, or maybe they were just rowing.
The exhibition closes in the 1880s with Renoir’s farewell to Impressionism in favour of classical depictions of the female nude, much admired by Picasso and Matisse.
We find here — a real coup — The Great Bathers, a depiction of three girls (too chunky for nymphs) by a pool, one splashing the others. It is, to my mind, a bad picture. The pose of the girl in the foreground, one leg clumsily in the air, is just weird. It’s based on François Girardon’s classical relief of the Bath of the Nymphs but his figures weren’t as awkward as these.
That picture marks a new chapter for Renoir. This show, however, celebrates the man who made life less hard by painting happy pictures. Thank God for that.