RENOIR’S CHANGE OF STYLE
1881-6
1869-70
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919)
Even though the skin colours have faded, this painting shows Renoir’s approach to figure painting during his Impressionist period. Later on he was to make the outlines much firmer.
1884-1887
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919)
Painted when Renoir had purified his outline and gave his figures a clearer sense of solidity.
Renoir was one of the main artists who generated the style known as French Impressionism, around 1870. However, as he describes (at right) he came to feel that ‘copying across’ was inadequate. So he began to work more from drawings, and to pay more attention to composing in the studio. He formed a linear style which he called ‘bitter’. In later life he relaxed this emphasis on outline, but never returned to the ‘copying across’ of the Impressionists.
About 1883 I had wrung Impressionism dry, and I finally came to the conclusion that I knew neither how to paint nor how to draw. In a word, Impressionism was a blind alley, as far as I was concerned …
I finally realized that it was too complicated an affair, a kind of painting that made you constantly compromise with yourself. Outdoors there is a greater variety of light than in the studio, where, to all intents and purposes, it is constant; but, for just that reason, light plays too great a part outdoors; you have no time to work out the composition; you can’t see what you are doing. I remember a white wall which reflected on my canvas one day while I was painting; I keyed down the colour to no purpose — everything I put on was too light; but, when I took it back to the studio, the picture looked black … If the painter works directly from nature, he ultimately looks for nothing but momentary effects; he does not try to compose, and soon he gets monotonous.
Cited in Jean Renoir
‘Renoir, My Father’, 1962