dewy, blushing.  You exclaim:  “How charming!” It is normal French painting, not the painting of the schools with their false ideal of pseudo-Greek beauty, but the intimate, clear, refined, and logical style of a man who does not possess the genius of Manet, Degas, or Monet, but is nevertheless an artist of copiousness, charm, and originality.  Charm; yes, that is the word.  There is a voluptuous magnetism in his colour that draws you to him whether you approve of his capricious designs or not.  The museum paid $18,480 for the Charpentier portrait, and in 1877, after an exposition in the rue Le Peletier, sixteen of his paintings, many of them masterpieces, netted the mortifying sum of 2,005 francs.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born at Limoges, February 25, 1840.  His father was a poor tailor with five children who went to Paris hoping to better his condition.  At the age of twelve the boy was painting on porcelain—­his father had picked up some rudiments of the art at Limoges.  Auguste did so well, displayed such energy and taste, that he soon fell to decorating blinds, and saved, in the course of four years, enough money to enable him to enter the atelier of Gleyre.  There he met Sisley, Bazille—­afterward shot in the Franco-Prussian war—­and Claude Monet.  They became friends and later allies in the conflict with the Parisian picture public.  Renoir made his first offering to the Salon in 1863.  It was refused.  It was a romantic bit—­a nude lady reclining on a bed listening to the plucked music of a guitar.  It seems that the guitarist, and not the lady, was the cause of offence.  It is a convention that a thousand living beings may look at an undressed female in a picture, but no painted man may be allowed to occupy with her the same apartment.  In 1864 Renoir tried again—­after all, the Salon, like our own academy, is a market-place—­and was admitted.  He sent in an Esmeralda dancing.  Both these canvases were destroyed by the painter when he began to use his eyes.  In 1868 his Lise betrayed direct observation of nature, influenced by Courbet.  Until 1873 he sent pictures to the Salon; that year he was shut out with considerable unanimity, for his offering happened to be an Algerian subject, a Parisian woman dressed in Oriental costume, and—­horrors!—­the shadows were coloured.  He was become an impressionist.  He had listened, or rather looked at the baleful pyrotechnics of Monet, and so he joined the secessionists, though not disdaining to contribute annually to the Salon.  In 1874 his L’allee Cavaliere au Bois de Boulogne was rejected, an act that was evidently inspired by a desire to sacrifice Renoir because of the artistic “crimes” of Edouard Manet.  Otherwise how explain why this easily comprehended composition, with its attractive figures, daring hues, and brilliant technique, came to have the door of the Salon closed upon it?