Brodskaya Nathalia - Auguste Renoir

Author: Nathalia Brodskaya

Layout: Julien Depaulis

Cover: Stphanie Angoh

ISBN : 978-1-78160-593-6

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Parkstone Press International, New York, USA

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Nathalia Brodskaya

Auguste

Renoir

Oil on canvas, 36.1 x 31.7 cm,

Williamstown (MA), Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges on 25 February 1841. He was the sixth child in the family of Lonard Renoir and Marguerite Merlet. Three years later, in 1844, the Renoirs moved to Paris. In 1848, Auguste began attending a school run by the Frres des Ecoles Chrtiennes. Renoir was lucky with the music teacher it proved to be the composer Charles Gounod, who took the boy into the choir at the church of Saint-Eustache.

In 1854, the boys parents took him from school and found a place for him in the Lvy brothers workshop, where he was to learn to paint porcelain. Renoirs younger brother Edmond had this to say:

From what he drew in charcoal on the walls, they concluded that he had the ability for an artists profession ()The young apprentice set about mastering the craft seriously: at the end of the day, he armed himself with a piece of cardboard bigger than himself and headed for the free drawing courses. It went on like that for two or three years.

He made rapid progress: a few months into his apprenticeship, he was already being set to paint pieces that they usually gave to qualified workers. That made him the butt of jokes. They called him Monsieur Rubens and he cried because they were laughing at him.

One of the Lvys workers, Emile Laporte, painted in oils in his spare time. He suggested Renoir make use of his canvases and paints. This offer resulted in the appearance of the first painting by the future Impressionist. It was solemnly presented for Laportes inspection at the Renoirs home.

Edmond Renoir recollected: Its as if it happened yesterday. I was still a boy, but I understood perfectly that something serious was taking place: the easel with the celebrated painting on it was set up in the middle of the largest room in our modest dwelling on the Rue dArgenteuil. Everyone was nervous and burning with impatience.

I was dressed up nicely and told to behave myself. It was very grand. The matre arrived At a signal, I moved his chair up close to the easel. He sat down and set about examining the work. I 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.

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 .

Besides the family, however, there was one other major educator in Renoirs 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, Lonard 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. 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 dArgenteuil, which ran through the whole area down to the Seine. Here, in the courtyard of the Louvre, the little Renoir played with other boys.

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 Andr .

The young Renoirs wanderings covered a far wider area than the Louvre district.

Museu de Arte de So Paulo, So Paulo

Oil on canvas, 66 x 81 cm,

Stockholm, Statens Konstmuseer

Oil on canvas, Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

An organic, almost physical sense of himself as part of the city was even then, in childhood, shaping the future artists 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. Ironically, it was the period of Renoirs 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. 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.