can see it now – it was Eve. Behind her, the snake was twined around the branches of an oak. It was approaching with open jaws, as if it wanted to cast a spell over Eve. The trial lasted a quarter of an hour at least, after which, without any superfluous comments, that poor old man came up to our parents and told them: “You should let your son go in for painting. In our trade the most he will achieve is to make twelve or fifteen francs a day. I predict a brilliant future for him in art. Do all you can for him.” That is how family legend recorded the birth of Renoir, the artist.
Frédéric Bazille at His Easel
1867
Oil on canvas, 106 × 74 cm
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Auguste Renoir positively acknowledged the role his family had played in shaping his future. It was from his parents that he obtained the respect for the crafts which remained with him all his life. Renoir liked the fact that his father and mother were simple people:
“When I think that I might have been born to intellectuals! I would have needed years to divest myself of all their ideas and to see things as they really are, and in that event I would not have had enough dexterity in my hands.”
Snowy Landscape
1868
Oil on canvas, 51 × 66 cm
Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris
Besides the family, however, there was one other major educator in Renoir’s life – Paris. In his conversations with his son Jean, the artist constantly recollected those little corners of the capital where he had spent his childhood and youth, many of which had disappeared before his eyes. One might see the hand of fate in the fact that after moving from Limoges, Léonard Renoir installed his family in the Louvre. The houses constructed in the sixteenth century between the Louvre palace and the Tuileries for noble members of the royal guard had by the middle of the nineteenth century lost their former imposing appearance.
Bathing on the Seine (La Grenouillère)
1868
Oil on canvas, 59 × 80 cm
Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
Only remnants of the old decoration – coats-of-arms, capitals, empty niches that once held statues – served as reminders of the past. Now occupied by lower class Parisians, this little district had a special atmosphere about it, oddly combining the everyday and the elevated. The Renoirs lived on the Rue d’Argenteuil, which ran through the whole area down to the Seine. Here, in the courtyard of the Louvre, the little Renoir played with other boys.
Léonard Renoir, the Artist’s Father
1869
Oil on canvas, 61 × 46 cm
Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis
It was entirely natural to go inside the palace which had become a museum at the time of the French Revolution. “When I was a boy, I often went into the galleries of ancient sculpture, without even knowing precisely why. Perhaps because I passed through the courtyards of the Louvre every day, because it was easy to get into those halls, and because there was never anyone there. I stayed there for hours, lost in day-dreams,” Renoir told the artist Albert André.
La Grenouillère
1869
Oil on canvas, 66 × 80 cm
Statens Konstmuseer, Stockholm
The young Renoir’s wanderings covered a far wider area than the Louvre district. An organic, almost physical sense of himself as part of the city was even then, in childhood, shaping the future artist’s work. He saw beauty in the narrow, almost mediaeval streets of old Paris, in the heterogeneity of the elements of Gothic architecture, in the never-corseted figures of the female market traders. And he suffered from the fact that the old Paris, his Paris, was being destroyed.
Flowers in a Vase
c. 1869
Oil on canvas, 64.9 × 54.2 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Ironically, it was the period of Renoir’s childhood and youth that saw the greatest burst of reconstruction and modernization in the history of the city. For a time, probably in 1859, Renoir worked for a Monsieur Gilbert on the Rue du Bac painting screens which served as portable religious images for missionaries. At this time he bought all he needed to work professionally in oils and painted his first portraits. The archives of the Louvre contain a permit issued to Auguste Renoir in 1861 to copy paintings in the museum.
Bather with a Griffon
1870
Oil on canvas, 184 × 115 cm
Museu de Arte, São Paulo
Finally, in 1862 Renoir passed the examinations and entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and, simultaneously, one of the independent studios, where instruction was given by Charles Gleyre, a professor at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
The second, perhaps even the first, great event of this period in Renoir’s life was his meeting, in Gleyre’s studio, with those who were to become his best friends for the rest of his days and share his ideas about art.
Algerian Woman
1870
Oil on canvas, 69.2 × 122.6 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington
In the studio Renoir immediately noticed a tall youth “with the elegance of people who let their servant put some wear on a new pair of boots for them.” Jean-Frédéric Bazille was indeed from a rich family. His parents owned an estate near Montpellier and were able to provide him with enough money to rent a studio in Paris. Even more important was the fact that his parents knew Edouard Manet, and Bazille had visited his studio many times.
The Algerian (Madame Clémentine Stora in an Algerian Costume)
1870
Oil on canvas, 84.5 × 59.6 cm
Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco
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