Renoir [antikvár]

Introduction pierre auguste renoir was born at Limoges on February 25th 1841. His father was a small tailor, who, apparently to provide future scope for his sons as well as for himself, moved with his family to Paris when Renoir was four. His parents had a taste and care for objets d'art which was not uncommon among the petite bourgeoisie of that gener- ation, and his own recollections make it clear that he grew up in an atmosphere in which the prospect of becoming an artist in some humble capacity did not seem impossible. His mother would point out the beauties of the scenery on their walks through the woods at Louveciennes, and when he went to school in the Rue d'Argenteuil he found himself being taught singing by no less a person than the yet unknown Gounod. His family talent for drawing already showed itself, and at thirteen (his brother was an heraldic engraver) his parents found the opportunity to apprentice him to a china manufacturer. This was a time when common china was still hand-painted in conditions that we would call sweated labour. Renoir painted floral patterns and bouquets on pieces of ware at the rate of five sous a dozen, becoming promoted, as he gained in skill, to profiles of Marie Antoinette. Although he did not at this time look forward to any other career it clearly did not satisfy him: he soon started going to evening drawing classes and paying regular visits to the Louvre, where he was struck by sixteenth-century sculpture, and by the paintings of Boucher. This was still the Paris which had not been transformed by Haussmann, and the Boulevard du Temple where Renoir worked was in one of the liveliest districts of the city. It was something of a perpetual fairground, full of the noise of pedlars, street performers and idlers exchanging badinage among the market trestles. All this the young Renoir enjoyed, as he did the théâtre populaire, with its naive melodramas. His biographer and friend, Georges Riviere, tells how he never lost his love for such pieces as Le Bossu and La Dame de Montsoreau where the good end happily and the wicked are always punished: he enjoyed them as he enjoyed the Parisian crowd, and his sympathy for popular life emerged in all his work. He grew up too much of the people ever to see them with the ironic detachment of Degas. It is not fanciful to suppose that already, in his visits to the Louvre, he recognised the living scene about him transposed into the ideal in the Bouchers, Watteaus and Fragonards which he was soon to have to copy for a living. Renoir's ambition was to enter the factory at Sevres as a porcelain painter, but his prospects were unexpectedly dashed. 'At the end of four years' apprenticeship,' he told Vollard, 'j ust as I saw opening before me at the age of seventeen the magnificent career of painter on porcelain at six francs a day, there befell a catastrophe which ruined my dreams for the future.' The mechanical printing of designs on chinaware was just being introduced, and the new process caught on at once with the public. The hand-painted product was now- considered too rough, and at any rate could not compete at the price: Renoir's employer shut up shop, and the young man was compelled to take to painting fans for a living. Suitable subject matter lay at hand in the copies he had already made of Watteau, Lancret and Boucher. In such employment, first with his fans and then with the decorations of blinds, he saved enough money to take a new step in his life. He had begun to experiment with oil paint at the china works; now the urge to continue became insistent. Despite the qualms of his family, and encouraged by his friend Laporte, he threw up his job with the blinds manufac- turer and entered the studio of Gleyre. At this free and easy establishment there was little teaching; for this, Renoir went to evening classes in life drawing and anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts. However, students were free at Glevre's