Pierre Auguste Renoir [antikvár]

Ss»» i. the judgment of paris. Collection Dr. and Mrs. Harry Bakwin Olzncrir When I first visited Renoir in 1908, he was sixty-seven years old. I had come to him in the hope that he would grant me an interview, but the prospects of inducing him to talk were less than encouraging. He had not spoken for publication since 1879— some thirty years—when his brother, hoping to help him tfirough a period of struggle and obscurity, wrote a piece about the artist and his work. I^Iy visits with Renoir lasted over a period of four years; but instead of the reticence I expected to find after his years of silence, I found him eager to talk, freely and unreservedly, about art. "There are days," he warned me, "when I chatter along like a magpie, and others when I can't say a word." Indeed, sometimes he would run on for so long that Gabrielle, who was both his housekeeper and his model, would rattle the dishes as a signal for me to be off. She feared that the conversations, after a full day of painting, would tire him. Frequently during the day, he was interrupted by terrible attacks of arthritic pain, some of them lasting as long as ten minutes. He would wait for the pain to subside, and then, his