Portraits by Renoir - Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 1997 by Gloria Groom

During this same period, however, Renoir continued to produce canvases composed and painted in a more traditional idiom for acceptance to the Salon, the annual statesponsored art competition. His most conspicuous nod to official painting was the enormous "Riding in the Bois de Boulogne," submitted to the Salon of 1873. A superbly executed, yet unabashed studio concoction in which the figures appear stuck onto the stage-like surroundings, the work seems to have been designed more to advertise his gifts for fashionable portraits than his persona as a revolutionary young proponent for the new painting. It was perhaps the rejection of this picture by the jury that propelled Renoir into an even greater involvement that same year with the artists Monet, Sisley, Pissaro, and Paul Cezanne, who also had been rejected from the Salon and were pursuing alternative exhibitions for their works.

The faces of Impressionism.

Between 1873 and 1876, Renoir most closely was associated with the Impressionists, both personally and artistically. By the summer of 1873, he was a regular at Claude Monet's home in Argenteuil. His portraits of Monet's wife, Camille, and his celebrated canvas of Monet painting a hedge of multicolored dahlias reveal how close stylistically Renoir had moved to his friend's aesthetic. Freed from the desire to make pictures whose themes and degree of finish would be appropriate for Salon standards, Renoir readily assimilated Monet's techniques. In the paintings of that period, he created scintillating surfaces made up of small dabs of pigment applied with uniform, yet somewhat nervous, brushstrokes, or dappled sunlight effects achieved through colored shadows and looser brushwork.

Indeed, Renoir had hit his stride. For the first time, he could afford to rent an apartment of his own on Paris' rue Saint-Georges, where he stayed for the next 10 years. There he hosted meetings of the Anonymous Society of Independent Artists, a group that would exhibit for the first time together in 1874 and forever would be dubbed the "Impressionists" by a critic of one of Monet's entries, "Impression, Sunrise."

In the second of these exhibitions, in 1876, Renoir showed 15 paintings, including portraits of Monet, Bazille, and himself--images that illustrate the significant friendships which had nurtured the development of his personal style. The following year, Renoir showed 21 works in the third Impressionist exhibition, including a portrait of Sisley. Although the Impressionists held eight exhibitions between 1874 and 1886, this was the last time Renoir would participate. By 1877, he was receiving portrait commissions from an ever-widening circle of collectors who would play a major role in the direction of his art and life.

Unlike Monet and Sisley, who lived outside Paris and concentrated almost exclusively on plein air landscape painting, Renoir was more committed to the human figure, particularly that of females. He painted a variety of people in the mid 1870s in his "high Impressionist" style, which consisted of fluttery brushwork that softened features and dissolved contours into the surrounding colored atmosphere. The majority represent members of the petit bourgeoisie, ranging from eight-year-old Marie-Adelphine Legrand, daughter of a shop assistant, to the fledgling actress Henriette Henriot, who modeled for Renoir to supplement her earnings. In each, Renoir recreated from the subject's everyday identity a vision of refinement, elegance, and dignity befitting royalty. Actresses were particularly appealing as subjects since they, like Renoir,were creators of artifice. Although he would paint theater celebrities such as Jeanne Samary, he clearly felt most comfortable in the company of women whose backgrounds were not so far removed from his own. These were women who "spoke his language" and who he transformed through the language of his art.