Painter of Women

While headlines screamed last week of intensified air raids over Britain and Germany, in Manhattan some pictures were put on view that had seen wars before. These pictures, of flowers, apples and of blooming, apple-cheeked women, were by France's late great Impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir. Some of them had been painted during the Franco-Prussian War while German troops laid siege to Paris, some while mobs roamed the Paris streets and fired public buildings during the Commune of 1871. The last of them had been painted while World War I's Big Bertha was dropping shells on the Tuileries.

Of such alarums, these rosy, sensuous canvases expressed not a hint: Painter Renoir had been too busy painting life's happy hues. The sternest people like to look at his peaceful nudes and landscapes. Even the Bolsheviks hung a roomful in Moscow's Museum of Modern Western Art, though they felt obliged to put up a warning: that Renoir was "a bourgeois whose art consistently ignored the great class struggle through the most important part of which he lived."

Son of an obscure tailor, Auguste Renoir was born exactly 100 years ago in the French porcelain-manufacturing city of Limoges. At the age of 14 he started his artistic career in Paris painting pink and blue flowers on teacups. He graduated to painting fans and devotional pictures for missionaries. When he entered the studio of Marc Charles Gabriel Gleyre, he soon ran afoul of his sober-minded teacher. Said Gleyre: "You seem to take painting as fun." Agreed Renoir, "If painting were not fun to me I should certainly not do it."

Painting was fun for Auguste Renoir all his life long. Women were his never-failing subjects. He painted them in bustles and fichus, gaily sipping aperitifs in cafes along the Seine, waltzing on the crowded floor of the Moulin de la Galette, undressing, getting out of bed, bathing, fixing their hair, sunning themselves naked. His brushes gloated over their rosy curves, imparted to their flesh a luminous, porcelainlike transparency unequaled since the days of Rubens.

Renoir's painter's tastes were hearty: he liked healthy servant girls with ruddy skin and ample breasts. Said he: "Have you ever seen a society woman whose hands were worth painting? A woman's hands are lovely if they are accustomed to housework. I had just as lief paint the first old crock that comes along, just so long as she has a skin that takes the light." According to Mme. Renoir, all her husband asked of a cook was that she have the proper sort of skin. Said he: "A painter who has the feel for breasts and buttocks is saved."

Renoir did not have to wait for posthumous fame. In his own lifetime, collectors bought his pictures hungrily at prices that ranged up to $18,102. Today, of the 4,000-odd paintings he turned out, more than half are owned in the U. S. One U. S. collector, terrible-tempered Dr. Alfred ("Argyrol") Barnes of Merion, Pa., amassed the largest Renoir collection in the world.

In his declining years, while World War I hammered at the gates of Paris, white-bearded old Renoir lived on a farm in the south of France. He was nearly paralyzed with arthritis, but with paintbrushes lashed to his gnarled hands, he still painted his sunset-colored nudes, still kept a temper as sunny as a boy's. When an irate admirer appeared with a forged Renoir, suggesting that the old man should sue the forger, Renoir merely painted the forgery over, made it into a genuine Renoir.

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