rpose of studying
popular types, or of painting white table-cloths amidst sunny foliage.
Yet Renoir is the only painter who has raised this small subject to the
proportions and the style of a large canvas, through the pictorial charm
and the masterly richness of the arrangement. The _Box_, conceived in a
low harmony, in a golden twilight, is a work worthy of Reynolds. The
pale and attentive face of the lady makes one think of the great English
master's best works; the necklace, the flesh, the flounce of lace and
the hands are marvels of skill and of taste, which the greatest modern
virtuosos, Sargent and Besnard, have not surpassed, and, as far as the
man in the background is concerned, his white waistcoat, his
dress-coat, his gloved hand would suffice to secure the fame of a
painter. The _Sleeping Woman_, the _First Step_, the _Terrace_, and the
decorative _Dance_ panels reveal Renoir as an _intimiste_ and as an
admirable painter of children. His strange colouring and his gifts of
grasping nature and of ingenuity--strangers to all decadent
complexity--have allowed him to rank among the best of those who have
expressed childhood in its true aspect, without overloading it with
over-precocious thoughts. Finally, Renoir is a painter of flowers of
dazzling variety and exquisite splendour. They supply him with
inexhaustible pretexts for suave and subtle harmonies.

[Illustration: RENOIR

WOMAN'S BUST]

His third manner has surprised and deceived certain admirers of his. It
seems to mix his two first techniques, combining the painting with the
palette knife and the painting in touches of divided tones. He searches
for certain accords and contrasts almost analogous to the musical
dissonances. He realises incredible "false impressions." He seems to
take as themes oriental carpets: he abandons realism and style and
conceives symphonies. He pleases himself in assembling those tones
which one is generally afraid of using: Turkish pink, lemon, crushed
strawberry and viridian. Sometimes he amuses himself with amassing faded
colours which would be disheartening with others, but out of which he
can extract a harmony. Sometimes he plays with the crudest colours. One
feels disturbed, charmed, disconcerted, as one would before an Indian
shawl, a barbaric piece of pottery or a Persian miniature, and one
refrains from forcing into the limits of a definition this exceptional
virtuoso whose passionate love of colour overcomes every diffic