Renoir, the painter of café walls...

Most people don't know that for a time before his paintings sold, the young Auguste Renoir made a sort of living painting café walls. The family of one café owner was amazed as they watched him rush up and down a ladder "like a squirrel." The owner was so pleased with the painting of Venus rising from the waves that Renoir's reputation got around and soon he had covered twenty Paris café walls with murals. Alas, not one remains. He was just a thin, eager painter who could paint a lovely girl on a wall in exchange for a glass of wine or a bowl of soup. This story is from the marvelous memoir RENOIR: MY FATHER, by the film director Jean Renoir.

Susan Vreeland's novel about Renoir

I think nothing can bring the everyday lives of the French impressionists to us more vividly than fine, sensitive historical fiction. In Luncheon of the Boating Party, Susan Vreeland tells the fascinating story of the painter Renoir and his many friends, all who modeled, or loaned money, or sewed dresses, or gave encouragement, or provided a small dog, or struggled with love, as he painted his famous picture. How many people contribute each in their own way to create a work of art! Often their voices or the colors of their individual lives are lost to time. Susan Vreeland has heard and captured those voices and created as well a picture of this most modest painter Renoir who said he wanted to put beauty in the world not ugliness, and who, in his final days on earth, exclaimed that at last he understood how to paint a flower.

Claude's love for Camille

Camille was eighteen when she met him and only thirty-two when she died; she left her good home to live with him and her parents disowned her. She was charming and a clever amateur actress and I think that their good friend, the struggling painter Renoir, had a particular tenderness for her for he painted her often and she almost always smiled for him with a special sweetness.(Who could not like Renoir?) Claude adored her and was devastated when she died. Here he painted her with a dog. What did he say to her as he painted? "Stay still just twenty minutes more, then we'll go out someplace cheap for dinner and wine and then, dearest, when we come home...." We try to hear the murmurs of the young lovers in a hidden room in Paris in 1866.

Did the impressionists make good husbands?

Many people think of artists as promiscuous and it is true a few of the impressionists had a roving eye. When Manet's wife caught him following another woman, he excused himself, saying,"But I thought it was you, dear!" However, Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, and Renoir were very devoted to their wives and depended on them very much. Monet never painted anyone as much as he did his first wife Camille; Renoir married a seamstress in his 40s and adored her, and Pissarro married his mother's maid Julie. As for the famous women artists, Cassatt did not marry and Morisot married Manet's brother Eugene....a real story there! The painting shown is of Sisley and his wife by their good friend Renoir.

The first oil paint tubes made impressionism

In 1841, when the very young Claude Monet had just celebrated his first birthday, the American artist John Rand patented the first collapsible metal tube for artist’s oil paint. Before that happy invention, artists had to grind their colors and mix them with oil and thinner and, if an artist wanted to work outdoors, he had to carefully pack his prepared paint in breakable glass vials or leaky animal bladders. By the time Claude was seventeen and beginning to paint, he was likely spending a lot of his money on those tubes. His good friend Renoir declared years later, “Without paint in tubes, there would be no impressionism.”

when Auguste Renoir was young...

Auguste Renoir was a tailor's son and, as a boy, slept on his father's workbench -- the low wood platform on which the father sat crosslegged each day and sewed. Unfortunately for Auguste, his father often left stray pins there...ouch! For a while as a teenager he had work hand-painting pieces of china, but one day a visiting artist informed the family that Auguste must become a real painter. The family burst into tears, knowing that would condemn their son to poverty. On the other hand, as a boy he had a beautiful singing voice and his choirmaster, the composer Gounod ("Faust" etc.), hoped Auguste would become an operatic tenor. Ah, the turns of fate! We might today hear stories of the legendary tenor Renoir as Faust instead of the sweet, gifted painter he became! Did he sing when he painted?