What's Wrong with Renoir?
"I had gone to the end of impressionism and I was reaching the conclusion that I didn't know how either to paint or draw."
This essay is part of an ongoing series celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the First Impressionist Exhibition, which debuted in Paris in 1874. If you’d like to read other essays on the history of Impressionism, you can do so here.
In 2015, a group of young protesters assembled outside the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. The target of their ire was the Impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The protest was motivated not by Renoir’s antisemitic beliefs (he was a fervent anti-Dreyfusard), nor contemporary pearl-clutching about his passion for the female nude. They simply felt that he was bad at painting.
“RENOIR SUCKS AT PAINTING,” read one sign. “We’re not iconoclasts. Renoir just SUCKS at painting!” cried another.
This tongue-in-cheek movement was spearheaded by Max Gellar, creator of the (satirical?) Instagram account, @renoir_sucks_at_painting. The account’s last post was in 2016—Gellar’s movement has largely faded, as most Internet trends do. But for about a year or two, his insistence that museum-goers should boycott the artist’s “treacle” and “mediocrity” caught fire.
Protests spread to other cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In response to the online fervor, one of Renoir’s descendants, Genevieve Renoir, came to his defense: “When your great-great-grandfather paints anything worth $78.1 million… then you can criticize. In the meantime, it is safe to say that the free market has spoken and Renoir did NOT suck at painting.”1 Take that, kids!
The painting that sold for $78.1 million in 1990 (over $180 million today) was Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876). It has something in common with most of Renoir’s best-loved works, including the above Luncheon of the Boating Party: they were painted before the mid-1880s.
As we come towards the end of our Impressionism series (stay tuned for Mary Cassatt next month), we’ve seen the artists branch in different directions later in their lives. Some, like Claude Monet and Berthe Morisot, leaned deeper into the Impressionist style. Others, like Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, moved beyond the movement and delved into new techniques.
But Renoir chose a different path. To many critics (and some of his contemporaries), he chose to go backwards.
Renoir met his first critic in 1862, when he joined the studio of Charles Gleyre. It was there that he befriended Monet and Alfred Sisley, and where his frustration with academic art began to simmer. Gleyre was unimpressed by Renoir’s work. “No doubt it’s to amuse yourself that you are dabbling in paint?” he sneered.
“Why, of course,” replied Renoir, “and if it didn’t amuse me, I beg you to believe that I wouldn’t do it!”2
Unlike wealthier peers such as Cézanne and Edgar Degas, Renoir did not have a trust fund to fall back upon should things have gone awry. He came from a working-class family and had to save every last penny to afford tuition fees. It is this that makes me genuinely respect his decision to join the Impressionists—Renoir was taking a true risk, and he would pay mightily if things didn’t work out. To save money, Renoir worked in a china shop, painting porcelain, murals, and blinds.
The following year, Gleyre’s pupils attended the infamous Salon des Refusés. As discussed in the first essay of this series, the Salon featured the artists who had been turned away from the Salon des Beaux-Arts. The star of the show was Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), which scandalized the public as much as it galvanized the younger artists in our series.
In his early twenties, Renoir managed to place a few works at the Salon des Beaux-Arts, including his 1867 portrait of his then-lover, Lise with a Parasol. As he grew ensconced within the circle of bohemians not yet known as the Impressionists, Renoir found a passion for painting en plein air. He also became fond of the leading French Realist Gustave Courbet, and often experimented with Courbet’s method of applying paint onto a canvas with a palette-knife. Unlike his friend Monet, Renoir wasn’t as staunchly opposed to academic art, and he borrowed freely both from more traditional styles as well as Realism.3
From the forest of Fontainebleau to lively scenes of urban life, Renoir’s paintings from the late 1860s through the 1870s most strongly adhere to Impressionism, as they are characterized by the loose brushwork, vivid colors, and play with sunlight that made the Impressionists famous. Elegantly-dressed bourgeois women were among his favorite subjects. Not only does Renoir allow us into a world that we as modern viewers will never experience, but in capturing these scenes, he is allowing himself into a world to which the son of a poor tailor would otherwise not belong.
Then, shortly after he completed one of his most famous works, Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81), Renoir’s work took an unexpected turn.
Renoir could never quite let go of the Old Masters, and during his extensive travels in 1881-1882, he was particularly moved by his time in Italy. He visited several cities, including Rome, Naples, and Venice, with the goal of viewing the works of Raphael and other Renaissance artists. When writing to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel from Naples, Renoir said that Raphael’s paintings “are wonderful and I should have seen them before. They are full of knowledge and wisdom.”4
His time in Italy forced him to consider if he had neglected his drawing skills. He later conceded that around 1883, “a sort of break occurred in my work. I had gone to the end of impressionism and I was reaching the conclusion that I didn’t know either how to paint or draw. In a word, I was at a dead end.”5
Renoir began painting and drawing more often in his studio, as he attempted to synthesize elements of his older style with that of the Renaissance artists he loved. His drawing skills improved, so much so that Morisot would describe him as a “draughtsman of the first order… I do not think it possible to go further in the rendering of form.”6 But his turning-back-the-clock on his style drew detractors. All the way back in 1913, Mary Cassatt commented that Renoir was painting abominable pictures “of enormously fat red women with very small heads.”7 His later work indeed favored female nudes with curvaceous figures, and it earned him the reputation for being reactionary.
It is predominately these works that inspired the wrath of the “Renoir Sucks” crowd. Some bemoaned his female nudes as sexist (though I haven’t seen the same fury towards works that depict thinner models). Others say they’re simply bad, and I’d be lying to you all if I said I thought The Great Bathers was “good.” I do find the women to be overly posed, and their faces don’t look human to me.
Evidently, the up-and-coming artists of the early 20th century disagreed. Among his fans were Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; one of Renoir’s later works, Bather Seated in a Landscape, Called Eurydice (1902–1904), was in Picasso’s private collection.8
It can be as instructive to analyze works one dislikes as it is to survey the works one loves. I do love Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. I really don’t favor his later works. Why?
As I write this, I’m reminded of the experience I had when listening to the Daisy Jones & The Six album, AURORA. If you’re unfamiliar, the novel Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid follows the rise and break up of a fictional 1970s rock band inspired by Fleetwood Mac. When the book was adapted to television, the fictional band was brought to life, complete with an album. The songs were catchy, and they fit within the context of the show. But they still felt like modern imitations of the 70s sound. Try as one may, when it comes to Hollywood versus Stevie Nicks, you’ll never beat the real thing.
That’s how I feel when I look at Renoir’s later works. Though he strived to reach the dazzling heights of the Renaissance masters, he barely summited the foothills. In my view, these works don’t possess the same breath of life present in his earlier masterpieces, as he struggled to achieve the elusive features of a bygone era.
Renoir married in his forties, and his sons would pursue careers in film and fine art. He suffered intense arthritis in his later years, though he refused to give up painting. On the day he died at 78 years old, he still had a paintbrush in his hands.9 As he neared his final days, he said of his art, “I think I am beginning to understand something about it.”
Brian Boucher, “Renoir’s Descendant Strikes Back at the Artist’s Haters on Instagram,” Artnet, October 6, 2015, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/renoir-debate-descendant-strikes-back-instagram-338145.
John Rewald, The History of Impressionism: Fourth, Revised Edition (Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 71.
Rewald, History of Impressionism, 162-165.
Rewald, History of Impressionism, 462.
Rewald, History of Impressionism, 486.
Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists (Vintage, 2006), 263.
Richard Covington, “Renoir’s Controversial Second Act,” Smithsonian Magazine, February 2010, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/renoirs-controversial-second-act-4941803/?no-ist.
Covington, “Renoir’s Controversial Second Act.”
Roe, Private Lives, 269.
I now appreciate Renoir even more for having the courage to challenge himself as an artist and find out what he could do. The problems you describe in the later paintings are surely there - they do not offer credible human figures to a modern eye - but I’m nonetheless enchanted by the placement of these timeless female figures in the softly colored landscapes given to no classical subject.
From Renoir’s generation, the American magazine writer Bret Harte was spurned for writing a certain formula of story again and again. It seems these two artists with a specific range for their talent made different choices, both criticized. One tested himself in a different style. The other tested himself, got no traction, and returned to the style he could deliver best. I like that both of them are approachable role models - not geniuses at all they attempted, but artists finding out what they could do. Thank you for this picture of Renoir, which makes me like him.
I love the mystery in Renoir's early masterpieces, where women often appear "trapped." In many of his paintings, women are surrounded by faceless men and other barriers that confine them, restricting their movement. They are frequently objectified by these men, with expressions of helplessness on their faces. In La Loge, the woman wears a dress resembling vertical prison stripes with a look of entrapment on her face.