Renoir and Impressionism

Impressionism takes its name from an insult. In 1874 a group of painters, refused or badly hung by the official Salon, rented a photographer’s studio on the boulevard des Capucines and showed their work themselves. A critic seized on one canvas by Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, and used its title to dismiss the whole room. The name stuck, and the group kept it. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was in that first exhibition, and in several of the seven that followed.

What did Impressionism change?

Three things, mostly. The painters worked from direct observation rather than from studio convention, often outdoors. They let the brushstroke stay visible instead of blending it away, so that the surface of the painting reads as paint. And they treated shadow as coloured rather than as an absence of light: a shadow on snow could be blue, a shadow on skin could be green. The Metropolitan Museum’s essay on Impressionism sets out how radical that was against the finish the Salon expected.

What the group did not share was a subject. Monet spent decades on water, weather and light on stone. Degas worked indoors, under artificial light, on bodies in motion. Pissarro painted fields and then streets. The label describes a method far better than it describes a set of paintings.

Where Renoir differed

Renoir applied the method to people. He had trained as a porcelain painter in his teens, decorating plates in a Paris workshop, and he never lost the habit of looking at a face as something worth an afternoon. While the others chased weather, he painted dancers at Montmartre, a girl with a watering can, friends around a table on a river terrace at Chatou.

That choice made the technical problem harder, not easier. Water can be broken into patches of colour without anyone objecting. A face cannot: break it too far and it stops being a person. Renoir built a whole vocabulary of rose, amber and green-shadow to keep skin warm and alive under dappled light, and it is the reason his crowd scenes still feel like company rather than composition.

The turn to line, and the return to warmth

Around 1881 Renoir travelled to Italy and looked hard at Raphael and at the wall paintings from Pompeii. He came back dissatisfied with what he later called his own formlessness, and spent several years drawing tighter, with firmer contours and cooler surfaces. The bathers of the mid-1880s belong to that stretch.

He did not stay there. The last two decades soften again: warmer, looser, heavier in the paint, the figures fuller. By then rheumatoid arthritis had badly deformed his hands, and he worked with the brush placed in his bandaged fingers. The late canvases are not the work of a man winding down; they are the work of someone who had decided what he wanted a painting to do and no longer argued about it.

How this reads on a wall

Impressionist paintings were made to be looked at from two distances. Close up, a Renoir cheek is a handful of unmixed strokes. Step back four or five feet and it resolves into a face in sunlight. That is worth knowing before you choose a size: a canvas that lives at the far end of a room can carry looser handling than one you pass within arm’s reach every day.

It also explains why the works in this collection are painted in oil by hand rather than printed. The visible stroke is not a decorative flourish added on top of the image; it is how the image is built. A surface that reproduces the mark reproduces the argument.

Follow the life

The Met essay on Auguste Renoir follows him from the porcelain workshop in Limoges to the last canvases painted with a brush strapped to his hand; the catalogue below follows the same route, work by work.

See the movement

The Met essay on Impressionism places his work alongside fellow Impressionists and explains what the group was actually arguing about.

Shop by warmth

Portraits, dancers, gardens and river afternoons each carry a different temperature of light into a room.