How to Choose a Renoir Reproduction

Reproductions of Renoir are harder to judge than reproductions of a landscape painter, and the reason is simple: his subject is skin. The eye forgives an approximate tree. It does not forgive an approximate cheek.

Hand-painted oil, or archival canvas print

A hand-painted oil is exactly that: a painter works the canvas in oil, building the surface as Renoir built his. You get real impasto; the ridges where the loaded brush left paint standing; and light moves across it as you move across the room. On a Renoir this matters more than on most painters, because so much of his effect comes from broken colour laid wet into wet. Expect a wait while it is painted and dried, and expect small departures from the museum canvas: it is a painting, not a photograph of one.

An archival canvas print reproduces the museum photograph on cotton canvas with pigment inks. It is faithful to the last brushmark, it arrives quickly, and it costs considerably less. Its limit is that the surface is flat: from a metre away you see the image, not the paint. For the late pearly nudes, whose whole quality is the melting of one warm tone into the next, a good print is often more faithful than a hurried hand-painted copy.

How to judge either one

Look at three things, in this order. Skin: Renoir’s flesh is never one colour; there are greens and violets in the shadows and the reproduction should show them. If the skin has gone uniformly pink or orange, the colour has been crushed. Edges: he let contours dissolve, especially after 1880. Hard black outlines around a figure are a sign of over-sharpening, not of fidelity. The darks: in the dance-hall scenes the darks are full of colour, never a flat black hole.

What to ignore

Ignore claims about the number of layers, and ignore any promise that a copy is indistinguishable from the original. Neither is checkable and neither is true. Judge what you can see in the photograph of the actual piece.

A reasonable default

If the painting is going somewhere you will pass every day and look at closely; a hallway, above a desk, beside a reading chair; the hand-painted oil earns its price in surface. If it is going high on a wall, in a room where it is seen from four metres and mostly as colour, the canvas print is the honest choice and the money is better spent on size.