nude that of the academicians, that poetised nude arranged according to a pseudo-Greek ideal, which has nothing in common with contemporary women.  What Renoir sees in the nude is less the line, than the brilliancy of the epidermis, the luminous, nacreous substance of the flesh:  it is the “ideal clay”; and in this he shows the vision of a poet; he transfigures reality, but in a very different sense from that of the School.  Renoir’s woman comes from a primitive dream-land; she is an artless, wild creature, blooming in perfumed scrub.  He sets her in backgrounds of foliage or of blue, foam-fringed torrents.  She is a luxuriant, firm, healthy and naive woman with a powerful body, a small head, her eyes wide open, thoughtless, brilliant and ignorant, her lips blood-red and her nostrils dilated; she is a gentle being, like the women of Tahiti, born in a tropical clime where vice is as unknown as shame, and where entire ingenuousness is a guarantee against all indecency.  One cannot but be astonished at this mixture of “Japanism,” savagism and eighteenth century taste, which constitutes inimitably the nude of Renoir.

[Illustration:  RENOIR

DEJEUNER]

[Illustration:  RENOIR

IN THE BOX]

M. Renoir’s second manner is more directly related to the Impressionist methods:  it is that of his landscapes, his flowers and his portraits.  Here one can feel his relationship with Manet and with Claude Monet.  These pictures are hatchings of colours accumulated to render less the objects than their transparency across the atmosphere.  The portraits are frankly presented and broadly executed.  The artist occupies himself in the first place with getting correct values and an exact suggestion of depth.  He understands the illogicality of a false perfection which is as interested in a trinket as in an eye, and he knows how to proportion the interest of the picture which should guide the beholder’s look to the essential point, though every part should be correctly executed.  He knows how to interpret nature in a certain sense; how to stop in time; how to suggest by leaving a part apparently unfinished; how to indicate, behind a figure, the sea or some landscape with just a few broad touches which suffice to suggest it without usurping the principal part.  It is now, that Renoir paints his greatest works, the Dejeuner des Canotiers, the Bal au Moulin de la Galette, the Box, the Terrace, the First Step, the Sleeping Woman with a Cat, and his most beautiful landscapes; but his nature is too capricious to be satisfied with a single technique.  There are some landscapes that are reminiscent of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the Woman with the broken neck is related to Manet; the portrait of Sisley invents pointillism fifteen years before the pointillists; La Pensee, this masterpiece, evokes Hoppner.  But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct:  the Jeune Fille au panier is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the delightful Jeune Fille a la promenade is connected with Fragonard; the Box, a perfect marvel of elegance and knowledge, condenses the whole worldliness of 1875.  The portrait of Jeanne Samary is an evocation of the most beautiful portraits of the eighteenth century, a poem of white satin and golden hair.