Renoir’s joyful, discreet and tender vision, devoid of any hint of sentimentality, ribaldry or drama, distinguishes him from the other painters of his day.
The artist locates the interactions he depicts in his paintings in the public space, the new, modern social and natural settings - theaters, restaurants, guinguettes, boulevards and gardens - frequented by various social classes.
Theses popular "scenes" of modern love encouraged greater freedom of morals and the blossoming of "illicit" loves, in an era when bourgeois conventions and religious morality still governed romantic and sexual relationships.
But Renoir did not stick to seduction games.
His couples are often part of a vast network of social and emotional interactions (friends, parents, children, etc.).
Love, understood as a fundamental force binding human beings to each other and to nature, guided his inspiration.
According to him, "a picture should be a pleasant thing, joyful and pretty".
His eye and his brush connected actions, looks, bodies and settings in compositions that are worlds in themselves.
Refusing to countenance the social determinisms and pessimistic eye that various naturalistic artists brought to the working classes (which he himself came from), by the same token he also avoided a darker reality that included poverty, alcoholism, prostitution and bourgeois male predation on working-class women, and the lot of unmarried mothers and abandoned children. | Source: © Musée d’Orsay
Pierre-Auguste Renoir | The Lovers, 1875 | National Gallery Prague
The resting couple of lovers amidst nature in The Lovers painting is rendered dynamically by quickly alternating colourful spots that imitate the trembling atmospheric light.
The way the two figures are modelled are specific for Renoir: the actress Henriette Henriot and the painter Pierre Frank-Lamy.
Renoir held a special position among impressionists, mostly landscape painters, because he frequently focused on figural topics. | Source: © National Gallery Prague
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