Robert L. Herbert on Pierre-Auguste Renoir

“In eighteenth-century art, Renoir found an echo of his convictions that man's natural proclivities were the source of art and of goodness. Once, he tells us in his writings, religion was a support for the imagination, but modern man, devoted to industry, engineering and the "false mania of perfection," has cast God out. Like John Ruskin, he believed that nature, not God, was now man's guide to spiritual and physical goodness, and like Wordsworth, he believed that nature was the place where man could free himself from the taint of civilization. There he could listen to his instinctive inner being, and by acting according to his own nature, he could rediscover nature at large. "Go and see what others have produced," reads one of his aphorisms, "but never copy anything except nature. You would be trying to enter into a temperament that is not yours and nothing that you would do would have any character."”

“The enemy of natural instinct, according to Renoir, was the spirit of rationalism in the urban-industrial world, the rationalism which he associated both with industry, and with the Renaissance-derived traditions of the hated Ecole des Beaux-Arts, rather than with the Gothic, whose buildings he praised in his 1877 polemic. Together with others of his generation, he regarded reason as a tool of modern industrial organization, a tyranny that subjected feelings to mere calculation. At the age of seventeen, then a craftsman in a porcelain works, he had been put on the street by new machinery which made hand painting redundant.”

“Renoir's free brushwork... is an expression of his society's longing for signs of those values that were threatened by the organization of the urban-industrial world: spontaneity, individualism, and the freedom to find consolation among natural things. ...[T]hose values were associated with leisure, with dancing, flowers, a Sunday outing in a park. His paintings of gardens and promenades embody ideals whose social meanings we recognize... the demand that social restraints be lifted to make room for natural instincts, the demand for access to nature, for leisure to cultivate the self—what are these, in another form, but the demands of that era's labor unions and social reformers? ...[S]truggles for more leisure, for more independence from the workplace, and as the unions grew stronger, the activities they organized for their members grew from picnics to suburban outings, and eventually to vacation camps in the country or on the seashore.”