sullen _ouvrier_ of
Zola or Toulouse-Lautrec--nor are the girls kin to Huysmans's Soeurs
Vatard or the "human document" of Degas. Renoir's philosophy is not
profound; for him life is not a curse or a kiss, as we used to say in
the old Swinburne days. He is a painter of joyous surfaces and he is
an incorrigible optimist. He is also a poet. The poet of air,
sunshine, and beautiful women--can we ever forget his Jeanne Samary? A
pantheist, withal a poet and a direct descendant in the line of
Watteau, Boucher, Monticelli, with an individual touch of mundane
grace and elegance.

Mme. Charpentier it was who cleverly engineered the portrait of
herself and children and the portrait of Jeanne Samary into the 1879
Salon. The authorities did not dare to refuse two such distinguished
women. Renoir's prospects became brighter. He married. He made money.
Patrons began to appear, and in 1904, at the autumn Salon, he was
given a special _salle_, and homage was done him by the young men. No
sweeter gift can come to a French painter than the unbidden admiration
of the rising artistic generation. Renoir appreciated his honours; he
had worked laboriously, had known poverty and its attendant
bedfellows, and had won the race run in the heat and dust of his
younger years. In 1904, describing the autumn exhibition, I wrote: "In
the Renoir _salle_ a few of the better things of this luscious brush
were to be found, paintings of his middle period, that first won him
favour. For example, Sur la Terrasse, with its audacious crimson, like
the imperious challenge of a trumpet; La Loge and its gorgeous
fabrics; a Baigneuse in a light-green scheme; the quaint head of
Jeanne Samary--a rival portrait to Besnard's faun-like Rejane--and a
lot of Renoir's later experimentings, as fugitive as music; exploding
bouquets of iridescence; swirling panels, depicting scenes from
Tannhaeuser; a flower garden composed of buds and blossoms in colour
scales that begin at a bass-emerald and ascend to an altitudinous
green where green is no longer green but an opaline reverberation. We
know how exquisitely Renoir moulds his female heads, building up, cell
by cell, the entire mask. The simple gestures of daily life have been
recorded by Renoir for the past forty years with a fidelity and a
vitality that shames the anaemic imaginings and puling pessimisms of
his younger contemporaries. What versatility, what undaunted desire to
conquer new problems! He has in turn painted