are built up.  “Built up”—­the expression is absurd.  Rather, it is as though forms had been melted down to their component colours, and the pool of iridescent loveliness thus created fixed by a touch of the master’s magic—­lightly frozen over by an enchanting frost.  Only ice is cold.  At any rate, what happens to the spectator is that first he perceives a tangle of rather hot and apparently inharmonious tones; gradually he becomes aware of a subtle, astonishing, and unlooked-for harmony; finally, from this harmony emerge completely realized and exquisitely related forms.  After which, if he has any sense of art, he remains spellbound and uncritical, and ceases to bother about how the thing was done.  That, at least, is my impression of Renoir’s latest style.  Examples of it abound in Paris, notably M. Maurice Gangnat’s collection; and it is said that the artist intends these pictures to improve by keeping.

In his pleasant, well-written introduction M. Albert Andre gives a portrait of Renoir that is almost too good to be true:  we are encouraged to believe just what we should like to believe.  It is incredibly sympathetic.  Yet it is very much what we might have guessed from the pictures had we dared.  And, indeed, we did dare—­some of us; for, besides its purely aesthetic character, its French taste and tact, the art of Renoir has over-tones to which the literary and historical intelligence cannot choose but listen.  An intimate eulogy of France by a most lovable Frenchman is what, in our lazy moods, we allow these pictures to give us.  They do it charmingly.  For instance, though I never saw a Renoir that could justify a district visitor in showing more of her teeth than nature had already discovered, here, unmistakably, are Parisians enjoying themselves in their own Parisian way.  Here is the France of the young man’s fancy and the old man’s envious dreams.  Here, if you please, you may smell again that friture that ate so well, one Sunday at Argenteuil, twenty years ago, in the company of a young poet who must have had genius and two models who were certainly divine.  And that group with the fat, young mother suckling her baby—­there is all French frankness and French tenderness and family feeling without a trace of its wonted grimness and insincerity.

Renoir is as French as French can be, and he knows it: 

Lorsque je regarde les maitres anciens je me fais l’effet d’un bien petit bonhomme, et pourtant je crois que de tous mes ouvrages il restera assez pour m’assurer une place dans l’ecole francaise, cette ecole que j’aime tant, qui est si gentille, si claire, de si bonne compagnie...  Et pas tapageuse.

Renoir will have his place in that school, but another niche has been prepared for him amongst an even grander company.  When, in 1917, Les Parapluies (a beautiful but not very characteristic work) was placed in the National Gallery some hundred English artists and amateurs seized the opportunity of sending the master a testimony of their admiration which, rather to their surprise and to their intense joy, apparently gave pleasure.  In this they said: