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It is disquieting to find the same sort of thing going on in England, where our painters are fiercely disputing with each other the crown of European painting, and our critics appraising the respective claims of Mr. Augustus John and Mr. John Nash as solemnly as if they were comparing Cézanne with Renoir.
Otherwise how explain why this easily comprehended composition, with its attractive figures, daring hues, and brilliant technique, came to have the door of the Salon closed upon it? The historic exposition at Nadar's photographic studio, on the Boulevard des Capucines, of the impressionists, saw Renoir in company with Monet, Sisley, and the others.
These younger men had apparently miscomprehended idiosyncrasies for ideas and that, save for a certain cleanness of intention, they were offering scarcely anything of what is to be found by way of realization in the pictures of a really great colorist like Renoir. The two artists who give the true thrill of this phase of the modern movement are without question Pissarro and Sisley.
There is a voluptuous magnetism in his colour that draws you to him whether you approve of his capricious designs or not. The museum paid $18,480 for the Charpentier portrait, and in 1877, after an exposition in the rue Le Peletier, sixteen of his paintings, many of them masterpieces, netted the mortifying sum of 2,005 francs. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born at Limoges, February 25, 1840.
Picasso was a great artist, because, abstract and austere, he was the man for the proletariat; whereas Renoir, who painted pretty pictures for the bourgeoisie, was no earthly good.
In his pleasant, well-written introduction M. Albert André gives a portrait of Renoir that is almost too good to be true: we are encouraged to believe just what we should like to believe. It is incredibly sympathetic. Yet it is very much what we might have guessed from the pictures had we dared.
Cazin, Guillemet, Gyp, Maufra, Monet, Luce, Pissarro, Rochegrosse, Sisley, Vauthier, Carrier-Belleuse, Berthe Morisot, Renoir, Jongkind, Raffaelli, *Helleu, Rodin, and many others participated in this noble charity, which brought the widow ten thousand francs. She soon died. Van Gogh painted a portrait of Tanguy about 1886. It is said to belong to Rodin.
That this should be the period beloved of amateurs does not surprise me. It is the period of Mme. Maître , La Loge , Moulin de la Galette , and M. Choquet "portrait d'un fou par un fou," Renoir calls it pictures of ravishing loveliness to set dancing every chord in a spectator of normal sensibility. Also, it is a period that has an extraordinary charm for the literary connoisseur.
Some time ago, however, before Picasso was found out, a young Russian æsthete so Mr. Fry tells us was licensed by the competent authority to pronounce that artist's eulogy, on the understanding, of course, that the lecture should somehow serve as a stick wherewith to beat the opposition. Nothing easier: Picasso was pitted against Renoir.
There certainly are ominous signs of academization amongst the minor men of the movement. There is the beginning of a tendency to regard certain simplifications and distortions as ends in themselves and party badges. There is some danger of an attempt to impose a formula on the artist's individuality. Fortunately two of Cézanne's contemporaries, Degas and Renoir, are still at work.
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