Renoir on Brighton Beach

My grandmother Sophie has two Renoir reproductions printed on embossed with brush strokes cardboard in her den on Brighton Beach. I was always fascinated with this as a child. This was the room I had to nap in when I visited my grandparents. Since then I have always HATED Renoir paintings. In college there was a class trip to the Renoir Show. I backed out at the last minute. "You hate renoir, why go?" I told myself.

Today is the birthday of painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841), born in Limoges, France, and one of the leading figures of the artistic movement known as Impressionism. The convention of the time was to paint only inside a studio, even if you were painting landscapes. But Renoir and his contemporaries moved outside, to take advantage of the natural light, and painted “en plein air,” or “in the open air.” About painting en plein air, Renoir sighed: “Out-of-doors there is a greater variety of light than in the studio, where the light is always the same. But that is just the trouble; one is carried away by the light, and besides, one can’t see what one is doing.”

Two of Renoir’s most famous paintings are Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876), in which a crowd of people enjoy the festive dance garden in Butte Montmarte in Paris, and Girl With a Watering Can (1876), in which a tiny girl in a pretty blue dress holds her watering can. Renoir once said, “Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained it is no longer art.”

One of Renoir’s most famous paintings, which many consider his masterpiece, is Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881), in which a group of spectacularly beautiful people lounge around with drinks and food. The woman at the left, holding a dog, would later become Renoir’s wife. (The dog was an Affenpinscher.) One critic called the painting “fresh and free without being too bawdy.” Most of the people in the painting are Renoir’s friends. He liked to populate his work with people he knew.

Later, he developed rheumatoid arthritis and suffered progressive deformities in his hands and shoulders and had to figure out a new way to paint. Sometimes he had an assistant bandage a brush to his hand. Sometimes he preferred sculpture. At the end of his life, he could no longer work, but still asked to be wheeled into his studio, where he would slowly wash his brushes and arrange his paints.