Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Lunch at the Restaurant Fournaise (The Rowers’ Lunch)
Oil on canvas. 55 x 65,9 cm
Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Potter Palmer Collection
‘Renoir: Intimacy’ at the Thyssen Museum ‘Renoir: Intimacy’ is the first retrospective in Spain to focus on the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). Thyssen Museum, 18 October 2016 to 22 January 2017.]]>
Source: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Writing about his father, the filmmaker Jean Renoir said: “He looked at flowers, women and clouds in the sky as other men touch and caress.” “Renoir: Intimacy”, the first retrospective in Spain to focus on the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), challenges the traditional concept that reduces Impressionism to the “ purely visual”. Rather, it emphasises the central role played by tactile sensations in Renoir’s paintings, which are present in all the different phases of his career and are expressed through a wide range of genres including group scenes, portraits, nudes, still lifes and landscapes.
While the figures in the group portraits of artists such as Manet and Degas tend to maintain their distance with the viewer, Renoir imbued his figures with a palpable closeness. In scenes with two or more, these figures habitually participate in a process of alternation between visual and physical contact: pairs of siblings or mothers and children in which one looks at the other, while the second responds by touching them.
On occasions these exchanges are constructed around a shared activity such as reading a book. In the case of his individual portraits, Renoir aimed to offer an experience comparable to physical contact by bringing the viewer as close as possible. While Degas surrounded his models with a setting and attributes that represent them, Renoir tended to tighten up the composition, omitting the setting in order to concentrate our gaze on the figure’s face.
Renoir: Intimacy is structured into six thematic sections: Impressionism: public and private; Commissioned portraits; Everyday pleasures; Northern and southern landscapes; Family and environment and Bathers.
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‘Passion for Renoir’ at Prado Museum, Madrid (exhibition, 2010)
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