Volume 47, Number 18 · November 16, 2000
Renoir the Irregular
By John Golding
Nature's Workshop: Renoir's Writings on the Decorative Arts
by Robert L. Herbert
Yale University Press, 278 pp., $35.00
Think of Impressionism and the two names most likely to come first to mind are those of Monet and Renoir. And of all the Impressionist painters Renoir is the most seductive. He painted many of Impressionism's most popular and memorable canvases. To name only three: The Theater Box (La Loge) of 1874, Ball at the Moulin de la Galette of two years later, and possibly the most celebrated of all, Luncheon of the Boating Party of 1880-1881. These paintings haunt and nourish the imagination in a way that individual works of Monet often do not. This is largely because Renoir was primarily a figure painter, and images of the human form alone or in the company of others are mostly easier to recall than landscapes, which, in the case of Monet—who came increasingly to concentrate on series of paintings of the same subject—tend to blur and blend into each other.
Review, 5323 words
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