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

Renoir's retreat also was linked to his personal situation, notably the birth of his sons--Pierre, Jean, the future film director, and Claude. In the absence of commissions and with new responsibilities on the domestic front, Renoir returned to portraiture. For the rest of his career, until his death in 1919, his subjects primarily were members of his immediate household. In these portraits, Renoir explored the theme of youth as innocence, indulging himself in costumed images of his sons reminiscent of 18th-century fantasy portraits.

His late-life fatherhood no doubt was bittersweet. By 1899, when he painted a brooding self-portrait, he already was suffering from the acute rheumatotid arthritis that eventually would cripple him.

Nevertheless, the vitality, daring, and inventiveness of the portraits Renoir painted in the early 20th century attest to the artist's continued interest in the genre and his will to work despite his infirmities. By then, he had developed a personal style that was very soft and colored, but luminous, and his focus had shifted from the Italian frescoes to the masters of color and broad handling--Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, and 18th-century artists. The influence of the latter is clear in the portraits of Madame Betty Thurneyssen and her daughter and that of her son, Alexander, in the guise of a shepherd. Both attest to the calmer, more idealized, and yet voluptuous nature of Renoir's mature style that so appealed to Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

Tilla Durieux, the celebrated German actress and wife of the German dealer, Paul Cassirer, was one of the last clients to sit for Renoir in his home at Cagnes near Nice. Looking at this golden-toned and sensual goddess, who seems regal and palpitating with life, one hardly would suspect that its creator was confined to a wheelchair with hands so crippled he barely could hold his brushes. Living only to paint, Renoir now could reap the benefits of what he long had wanted his art to be--not a mirror of life, but an escape from it.

"Renoir's Portraits: Impressions of an Age" is the first major exhibition devoted exclusively to the artist's talents in this genre. More than 60 pictures have been selected that represent the wide variety of people he painted--from his earliest artist friends who would become the Impressionists to the cosmopolitan clients who sought him out towards the end of his career. Through extensive archival research, there now are new information and, in some cases, new identities for the people Renoir transformed and immortalized by his art. What emerges is a more complete and richer picture of Renoir's relationships, life, and art.

The exhibition will be on view at The Art Institute of Chicago through Jan. 4, 1998. It then will travel to the Kimbell Art Museum, Ft. Worth, Tex. (Feb. 8-April 6, 1998).

Ms. Groom is associated curator of European painting, The Art Institute of Chicago, (Ill.).