Towards the end of 1881 Renoir set out on a tour in Italy, and, as if to show how little he was affected by what he found there, painted at Naples a large and important Baigneuse (now in the Durand-Ruel collection) in which I can discover not the slightest trace of Italian influence.  He is too thorough a Frenchman to be much of anything else.  The emphatic statement and counter-statement of the great Primitives is not in his way.  He prefers to insinuate.  Even in his most glorious moments he is discreet and tactful, fonder of a transition than an opposition, never passionate.  The new thing that came into his art about this time, and was to affect it for the next twenty years, was not Italy but Ingres.

The influence was at first an unhappy one.  During three or four years, unable, it seems, to match the new conception of form with his intensely personal reaction, Renoir produced a certain number of unconvincing and uncharacteristic pictures (e.g., the dance series, Dance a la Ville, etc.).  There is an uneasy harshness about the contours, the forms are imperfectly felt, they are wooden even, and in their placing one misses the old inevitability.  Signed with another name these essays might by a dashing critic be called doctrinaire.  Then in 1885 came the first Baigneuses (collection J.E.  Blanche), whereby Renoir put himself a good head above all contemporaries save Cezanne.  If this picture were hung in a public gallery, and the numerous drawings made for it ranged alongside, how finely discredited would be those knowing ones who, in their desire to emphasize the difference between form and that of which form is composed, are in the habit of calling Renoir a great colourist and then pausing impressively.  I suppose it is because he rarely uses a lead pencil that the wiseacres are able to fulfil their destiny.  Drawing in charcoal or pastel need not be taken seriously; while drawing with the brush is apparently not drawing at all.  That Renoir is a great draughtsman may be inferred from almost everything he has ever done.  But (though that amazing Boy with a Cat was achieved as early as 1868) it is the work of this period—­and Les Baigneuses, with its attendant studies, are capital examples—­that makes patent his mastery and entitles him obviously to a place between Ingres and Daumier.

That it should be difficult to find a date for the beginning of Renoir’s last period does not much trouble me; but I am sorry that it is quite impossible to indicate in words its character.  One can say confidently that the new conception was being elaborated between 1895 and 1900; one can suppose that its final character was to some extent imposed on the master by his growing infirmities.  A painter who can hardly move arm or fingers will neither sweep nor wiggle.  He must paint, if he is to paint at all, in blobs and smears and patches and soft strokes; and it is out of these that Renoir’s latest works