The historic exposition at Nadar’s photographic studio, on the Boulevard des Capucines, of the impressionists, saw Renoir in company with Monet, Sisley, and the others.  His La Danseuse and La Loge were received with laughter by the discerning critics.  Wasn’t this the exhibition of which Albert Wolff wrote that some lunatics were showing their wares, which they called pictures, etc.? (No, it was in 1875.) From 1868 to 1877 Renoir closely studied nature and his landscapes took on those violet tones which gave him the nickname of Monsieur Violette.  Previously he had employed the usual clear green with the yellow touches in the shadows of conventional paysagistes.  But Pissarro, Monet, Sisley, and Renoir had discovered each for himself that the light and shade in the open air vary according to the hours, the seasons, the atmospheric conditions.  Monet and Pissarro in painting snow and frost effects under the sun did not hesitate to put blue tones in the shadows.  Sisley was fond of rose tones, Renoir saw violet in the shadows.  He enraged his spectators quite as much as did Monet with his purple turkeys.  His striking Avant le bain was sold for one hundred and forty francs in 1875.  Any one who has been lucky enough to see it at Durand-Ruel’s will cry out at the stupidity which did not recognise a masterly bit of painting with its glowing, nacreous flesh tints, its admirable modelling, its pervading air of vitality.  Renoir was never a difficult painter; that is, in the sense of Monet or Manet or Gauguin.  He offended the eyes of 1875, no doubt, but there was in him during his first period much of Boucher; his female nudes are, as Camille Mauclair writes, of the eighteenth century; his technique is Boucher-like:  “fat and sleek paint of soft brilliancy laid on with the palette-knife with precise strokes around the principal values; pink and ivory tints relieved by strong blues similar to those of enamels; the light distributed everywhere and almost excluding the opposition of the shadows; vivacious attitudes and decorative convention.”

Vivacious, happy, lyrical, Renoir’s work has thus far shown no hint of the bitter psychology of Edgar Degas.  His nudes are pagan, child women full of life’s joy, animal, sinuous, unreasoning.  His genre tableaux are personal enough, though in the most commonplace themes, such as Dejeuner and The Box—­both have been exhibited in New York—­the luminous envelope, the gorgeous riot of opposed tones, the delicious dissonances literally transfigure the themes.  In his second manner his affinities to Claude Monet and impressionism are more marked.  His landscapes are more atmospheric, division of tones inevitably practised.  Everything swims in aerial tones.  His portraits, once his only means of subsistence, are the personification of frankness.  The touch is broad, flowing.  Without doubt, as Theodore Duret asserts, Renoir is the first of the impressionistic portrait painters; the first to apply unflinchingly the methods of Manet