Rags To Riches

As France marks the centenary of Renoir’s death this year, Mark Stratton sets out to discover the places which inspired the incredible French Impressionist and the amazing oeuvre he has left behind

- Mark Stratton

Imagined as an Impressionist painting, the smoke-filled bar and revelry of Café Guerbois in the 1860s is a swirling canvas of vivacious brushstrokes. Central to the painting is a table of regular patrons. Artist Édouard Manet, slightly older, holds court over a cabal of young acolytes soon to become France’s greatest artists: Monet, Degas, Cézanne, all seated together.

On the periphery, however, is a shyer, scrawny, waspish-looking young man, working class, a little awed by his bourgeoisie friends. He is penniless, his embryonic Impressionist style mocked by art critics. Yet when he laid down his palette one final time exactly 100 years ago in December 1919, he would be France’s most celebrated artist, bequeathing humanity masterpieces that today create hushed reverence and auction for staggeringly high prices. He is Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Marking the centenary of his death, I travelled around France tracing where he lived, loved and painted.

My companion for the trip is Barbara Ehrlich-White’s astonishingly detailed Renoir: An Intimate Biography, which draws upon 2,000 letters from and about him. She describes him as ‘one of the greatest creative artists that ever lived’, with some 4,654 original paintings, yet an oft contrary character: ‘gregarious or timid, generous or stingy… open or secretive’.

Born in Limoges in 1841 into a humble tailor’s family, his parents moved to Paris when he was four. After dropping out of school this precocious boy apprenticed to a porcelain decorator. In 1862 he entered the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and thereafter studied under Swiss artist, Charles Gleyre, where he befriended fellow Impressionist, Claude Monet.

Paris life