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Updated: October 6, 2025
But even if true, the lecturer's facts would have been beside the point. To say that a work is aristocratic or democratic, moral or immoral, is to say something silly and irrelevant, or rather, silly if meant to be relevant to its value as art. In the work of Renoir and of Picasso, in all works of art for that matter, the essential quality, as every sensitive person knows, is the same.
Both Renoir and Degas lived well on into the period of which I am writing; but though both were admired, the former immensely, neither up to the present has had much direct influence on contemporary painting. From 1908 I choose that year to avoid all risk of ante-dating there existed side by side, and apparently in alliance, with the Fauves a school of theoretical painters.
But what is certain is that, during his last period, since 1900 that is to say, though so crippled by rheumatism that it is with agonizing difficulty he handles a brush, he has produced works that surpass even the masterpieces of his middle age. Renoir was born in 1841, and in '54 bound prentice to a china-painter.
Amidst many faulty and clumsy works, Van Gogh has also left some really beautiful canvases. There is a deep affinity between him and Cézanne. A very real affinity exists, too, between Paul Gauguin, who was a friend and to a certain extent the master of Van Gogh, and Cézanne and Renoir.
But wherever a Renoir hangs there will be eyes to feast upon his opulent and sonorous colour music. In the autumn of 1865 Théodore Duret, the Parisian critic, found himself in the city of Madrid after a tour of Portugal on horseback. A new hotel on the Puerta del Sol was, he wrote in his life of Manet, a veritable haven after roughing it in the adjacent kingdom.
We know how exquisitely Renoir moulds his female heads, building up, cell by cell, the entire mask. The simple gestures of daily life have been recorded by Renoir for the past forty years with a fidelity and a vitality that shames the anæmic imaginings and puling pessimisms of his younger contemporaries. What versatility, what undaunted desire to conquer new problems!
It is so fascinating, that one cannot but love its very mistakes which make it more human and more accessible. Renoir is the most lyrical, the most musical, the most subtle of the masters of this art. Some of his landscapes are as beautiful as those of Claude Monet. His nudes are as masterly in painting as Manet's, and more supple.
Miss Van Tuyn wondered again whether he had ever heard of Leonardo. Garstin mentioned some Paris painters of the past, but of more recent times than those of the grand old Italians, spoke of Courbet, of Manet, of Renoir, Guilaumin, Sisley, the Barbizon school, Cezanne and his followers.
One may say as much, having regard to their differing degrees of success, of Pissaro, who influenced him, and of Caillebotte, Renoir, Sisley, and the rest of the impressionists who followed him. He is himself the prominent representative of the school, however, and the fact that one representative of it is enough to consider, is eloquent of profound criticism of it.
This great painter, one of those who did most honour to the French soul, had the genius to create by himself an Impressionism of his own which will always remain his own, after having given evidence of gifts of the first order in the tradition handed down by the masters of the real and the good. He cannot be confused either with Monet, or with Pissarro and Renoir.
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