[The Lower Depths (Les Bas-Fonds), The Diary of a Chambermaid, and Picnic on the Grass] possess an incredible richness of idea and imagination, partly because of their strangeness. If Renoir's art were wholly a function of its thematic complexity … I'd have to put them among the glories of his career. But I am not persuaded that such complexity is always greatness, though it is a great boon to essay writers, or that there is so much foolishness in the vulgar common view that celebrates Renoir the populist realist or the nature-loving son of his famous father. That view isn't false; it is merely incomplete. (p. 22)

Renoir's realism follows several different lines. Some of it belongs to the classic realist preoccupations of, say, The Southerner or Toni. But more of it seems to grow out of an appreciation of the kind of "realism" your parents had in mind when...