Auguste Renoir

The life of Auguste Renoir,
scene by scene

1. 1854Paris

   Thirteen-year-old Auguste heads off each morning not to school but to a porcelain workshop in Paris. His parents had placed him as an apprentice with the Lévy brothers. His father was a tailor, and money at home was tight.

   His job was to paint flower patterns onto white plates and dishes. A few years later he began studying art, and around 1862, in the studio of Charles Gleyre, he met Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille.

2. 1869Bougival

   On the Seine west of Paris, twenty-eight-year-old Renoir and his friend Monet set up their easels side by side. They painted La Grenouillère, a floating café and bathing spot, from the same place. Both of them were desperately poor.

   That year Monet wrote to their friend Bazille. For eight days, he said, they had had no bread, no wine, and no fire to cook on. And he added that Renoir was bringing them bread from his own home so they would not starve.

3. 1879Paris

   A large portrait by Renoir hangs at the Salon, the official exhibition. It shows the wife of the publisher Georges Charpentier with her two children. That year he chose the Salon over the Impressionist show.

   Madame Charpentier used her influence to get the picture a good spot on the wall, and the reviews were kind. Afterward, wealthy Paris families began asking him for portraits. A door had opened for a struggling painter.

   Painted around this timeMadame Georges Charpentier (Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Emile-Charles (1875–1895)
4. 1881Chatou

   On the terrace of the Restaurant Fournaise in Chatou, on the Seine, Renoir paints two young women. This boaters' restaurant was a favorite haunt of his, and around then he also painted Luncheon of the Boating Party there, using his friends as models.

   The two models in Two Sisters (On the Terrace) were not sisters at all. Renoir paid two unrelated models to pose. Next to the older girl in the red hat, a little girl in a flower-covered hat rests her hand on a basket of yarn. The picture was shown the next year at the seventh Impressionist exhibition.

   Painted around this timeTwo Sisters (On the Terrace)
5. 1882Palermo

   On January 15, 1882, in Palermo, Sicily, Renoir sits down to paint Richard Wagner. The composer had just finished his opera Parsifal there.

   Renoir was given thirty-five minutes. In that short time he caught Wagner's face on canvas. The portrait now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. On the same trip he saw paintings by Raphael and ancient wall paintings from Pompeii.

6. 1883Paris

   In April 1883 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel opens a show in his Paris gallery made up entirely of Renoir's work. For the first time, the forty-two-year-old painter's pictures are gathered in one room of their own.

   In By the Seashore, from the same year, a young woman sits in a wicker chair, a thin hook in her fingers and white needlework in her lap. Behind her the sea rolls, dotted with small sailboats. That fall Renoir stayed on Guernsey in the English Channel and painted its rocky beaches.

   Painted around this timeBy the Seashore
7. 1892Paris

   Renoir's friends were annoyed. He was past fifty, and the French state had never once bought a picture from him. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé and the arts official Roger Marx set out to change that.

   That year the state bought one of his paintings of two girls at a piano for the Musée du Luxembourg. A painter once turned away by the Salon now had work in a national museum. In Young Girl Bathing, painted the same year, a white cloth done in quick, thick strokes lies beside the girl.

   Painted around this timeYoung Girl Bathing
8. 1919Paris

   In 1919, seventy-eight-year-old Renoir is carried into the Louvre in a chair. He has come to see one of his portraits of Madame Charpentier, now hanging there. He lived to see his own work on the Louvre's walls.

   His body had been stiffening for years. In 1897 he fell off a bicycle and broke his right arm, and his rheumatism grew so bad that he painted from a wheelchair in his last years. On December 3 of that year, he died at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France.