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by the prettiness naturally, for he began by painting flowers on porcelain. Even through years of struggle when he was “so poor,” as Bazille said, “that he used to pick up empty paint tubes and still squeeze something out of them,” Renoir kept his cheerful optimism. This joie de vivre makes him perhaps the most beloved, and accessible, painter ever. Renoir’s subjects were invariably crowd pleasers: beautiful women (often nude), flowers, pretty children, sunny outdoor scenes full of people and fun. He rooted his art in actual experience, convinced, as he said, that “Life was a perpetual holiday.”

“Le Moulin de la Galette” (the name of a popular outdoor café) bursts with gaiety. Like Monet, who often painted the same subject at Renoir’s side, Renoir fragmented form into glowing patches of light applied as short brushstrokes of distinct colors. The absence of outline, with form suggested by highlights, and dappled light are other Impressionist features, as was his refusal to use black. “It’s not a color,” he said, believing black punched a hole in the canvas. (He painted shadows and coats dark blue.) By snipping off figures at the edge of the canvas, he implied the scene expanded beyond the frame and engaged the viewer. His subjects seem unposed — momentarily caught in the flux of living.

Renoir, “Le Moulin de la Galette,” 1876, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Renoir specialized in human figures bathed in light and color, expressing the everyday joys of life. “The earth as the paradise of the gods, that is what I want to point, ” he said.

Renoir’s brother described the painter’s research for the picture as far from onerous: “When he painted the Moulin de la Galette he settled down to it for six months, wedded to this whole world which so enchanted him, and for which models in poses were not good enough. Immersing himself in this whirlpool of pleasure-seeking, he captured the hectic moment with dazzling vivacity.”

As his Impressionist works gained success, however, Renoir became discontent with the style, saying in 1881, “[I] had traveled as far as Impressionism could take me.” He rejected the insubstantiability of the Impressionist method and looked for a more organized, structured technique. After studying Renaissance masters, Renoir turned away from contemporary scenes toward universal subjects, particularly nudes in classical poses.

NUDES. Renoir’s favorite eighteenth-century artists were the painters of pretty women, Boucher and Fragonard. Where Fragonard boasted he painted with his bottom, Renoir claimed to paint with his maleness. A lusty, enthusiastic man, Renoir delighted in his portrayal of sensuous, rosy, ample nude women whom he described in amorous terms: “I consider my nude finished when I feel like smacking her bottom.”

Hot red is the dominant color in his paintings of nudes, for he took great care to approximate healthy flesh tones. “I want a red to be loud, to ring like a bell; if it doesn’t turn out that way, I put on more reds or other colors until I get it,” he explained. “I look at a nude; there are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver.”

Renoir wanted to express more than just vitality and fertility, however, with his earth-mother nudes. He paid new attention to design and outlined forms distinctly in his “manière aigre” (sharp style). He posed the nudes in crisp arrangements according to Classical prototypes, as Venuses and nymphs, and eliminated background detail for a sense of timeless grandeur. “I like painting best when it looks eternal without boasting about it,” he said, “an everyday eternity, revealed on the street corner: a servant-girl pausing a moment as she scours a saucepan, and becoming a Juno on Olympus.”

After 1903 Renoir, afflicted with severe arthritis, lived on the Riviera. Confined to a wheelchair, his hands paralyzed, he painted with a brush strapped to his wrist. Despite what his dealer called the “torture” of this “sad state,” Renoir displayed “the same good disposition and the same happiness when he [could] paint.