WHAT a lover of the commonplace Renoir was! It is a rare quality among artists. A theoretically pure artist exists no more than a Euclidean point, but if such a being could exist, every possible actual sight would be equally suitable as a point of departure for his artistic vision. Everything would stir in him the impulse to creation. He would have no predilections, no tastes for this or that kind of thing. In practice every artist is set going by some particular kind of scene in nature, and for the most part artists have to search out some unusual or unexplored aspect of things. Gauguin, for instance, had to go as far as Tahiti. When Renoir heard of this, he said, in a phrase which revealed his own character: “Pourquoi? On peint si bien a Batignolles.” But there are plenty of artists who paint more or less well at Batignolles or Bloomsbury and yet are not lovers of the commonplace. Like Walter Sickert, for instance, they find their Tahiti in Mornington Crescent. Though they paint in commonplace surroundings, they generally contrive to catch them at an unexpected angle. Something odd or exotic in their taste for life seems to be normal to artists. The few artists or writers who have shared the tastes of the average man have, as a rule, been like Dickens—to take an obvious case—very imperfect and very impure artists, however great their genius. Among great artists one thinks at once of Rubens as the most remarkable example of a man of common tastes, a lover of all that was rich, exuberant and even florid. Titian, too, comes nearly up to the same standard, except that in youth his whole trend of feeling was distorted by the overpowering influence of Giorgione, whose tastes were recondite and strange. Renoir, in the frankness of his colour harmonies, in his feeling for design and even in the quality of his pigment, constantly reminds us of these two. Now it is easier to see how an artist of the sixteenth or seventeenth century could develop commonplace tastes than one of our own times. For with the nineteenth century came in a gradual process of differentiation of the artist from the average man. The modern artist finds himself so little understood by the crowd, in his aims and methods, that he tends to become distinct in his whole attitude to life.

What, then, is so peculiar about Renoir is that he has this perfectly ordinary taste in things and yet remains so intensely, so purely, an artist. The fact is perhaps that he was so much an artist that he never had to go round the corner to get his inspiration; the immediate, obvious, front view of everything was more than sufficient to start the creative impulse. He enjoyed instinctively, almost animally, all the common good things of life, and yet he always kept just enough detachment to feel his delight Æsthetically—he kept, as it were, just out of reach of appetite.

More than any other great modern artist Renoir trusted implicitly to his own sensibility; he imposed no barrier between his own delight in certain things and the delight which he communicates. He liked passionately the obviously good things of life, the young human animal, sunshine, sky, trees, water, fruit; the things that every one likes; only he liked them at just the right distance with just enough detachment to replace appetite by emotion. He could rely on this detachment so thoroughly that he could dare, what hardly any other genuine modern has dared to say how much he liked even a pretty sight. But what gives his art so immediate, so universal an appeal is that his detachment went no further than was just necessary. His sensibility is kept at the exact point where it is transmuted into emotion. And the emotion, though it has of course the generalised Æsthetic feeling, keeps something of the fulness and immediacy of the simpler attitude. Not that Renoir was either naÏve or stupid. When he chose he showed that he was capable of logical construction and vigorous design. But for his own pleasure he would, as he himself said, have been satisfied to make little isolated records of his delight in the detail of a flower or a lock of hair. With the exception of “Les Parapluies” at the National Gallery we have rarely seen his more deliberate compositions in England. But in all his work alike Renoir remains the man who could trust recklessly his instinctive reaction to life.

Let me confess that these characteristics—this way of keeping,

as it were, just out of reach of appetite—makes Renoir to me, personally, a peculiarly difficult artist. My taste for exotic artists such as Cosima Tura and his kin amounts at times to a vice. Consequently, I am sometimes in danger of not doing Renoir justice, because at the first approach to one of his pictures I miss the purely accessory delight of an unexpected attitude. The first approach to one of his pictures may indeed remind one of pictures that would be the delight of the servants’ hall, so unaffectedly simple is his acceptance of the charm of rosy-cheeked girls, of pretty posies and dappled sunlight. And yet one knows well enough that Renoir was as “artful” as one could wish. Though he had not the biting wit of a Degas, he had a peculiar love of mischievous humour; he was anything but a harmless or innocent character. All his simplicity is on the surface only. The longer one looks, the deeper does Renoir retire behind veil after veil of subtlety. And yet, compared with some modern artists, he was, after all, easy and instinctively simple. Even his plastic unity was arrived at by what seems a more natural method than, say, CÉzanne’s. Whereas CÉzanne undertook his indefatigable research for the perspective of the receding planes, Renoir seems to have accepted a very simple general plastic formula. Whatever CÉzanne may have meant by his celebrated saying about cones and cylinders, Renoir seems to have thought the sphere and cylinder sufficient for his purpose. The figure presents itself to his eye as an arrangement of more or less hemispherical bosses and cylinders, and he appears generally to arrange the light so that the most prominent part of each boss receives the highest light. From this the planes recede by insensible gradations towards the contour, which generally remains the vaguest, least ascertained part of the modelling. Whatever lies immediately behind the contour tends to become drawn into its sphere of influence, to form an undefined recession enveloping and receiving the receding planes. As the eye passes away from the contour, new but less marked bosses form themselves and fill the background with repetitions of the general theme. The picture tends thus to take the form of a bas-relief in which the recessions are not into the profound distances of pictorial space, but only back, as it were, to the block out of which the bossed reliefs emerge, though, of course, by means of atmospheric colour the eye may interpret these recessions as distance. This is clearly in marked contrast to CÉzanne’s method of suggesting endless recessions of planes with the most complicated interwoven texture.

Renoir’s drawing takes on the same fundamental simplicity. An Ingres arrived at the simplified statement necessary for great design by a process of gradual elimination of all the superfluous sinuosities which his hand had recorded in the first drawing from nature. Renoir seems never to have allowed his eye to accept more than the larger elements of mass and direction. His full, rounded curves embrace the form in its most general aspect. With advancing years and continually growing science he was able, at last, to state this essential synthesis with amazing breadth and ease. He continually increased the amplitude of his forms until, in his latest nudes, the whole design is filled with a few perfectly related bosses. Like Titian’s, Renoir’s power of design increased visibly up to the very end of his life. True, he was capable at all periods of conceiving large and finely co-ordinated compositions, such as “Les Parapluies” and the “Charpentier family”; but at the end even the smallest studies have structural completeness.