Renoir puzzles me. I’ve never understood why so perceptive a critic as Julius Meier-Graefe, usually an acute judge of originality and excellence, thought Renoir was second only to Corot and believed both artists to be superior to Cézanne. I keep hoping for enlightenment, but so far, nothing—neither encounters with individual works, nor the comprehensive retrospective jointly organized ten years ago by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, nor, most recently, the Clark Art Institute’s survey of its own substantial holdings, “A Passion for Renoir”—has done the trick.[1] Renoir continues to give me trouble. He occasionally charms me, frequently lets me down, sometimes amuses me, and every once in while surprises me. And I’m not the only one who has felt this way. “My reactions to Renoir keep changing,” Clement Greenberg wrote. “One day I find him almost powerful, another day almost weak; one moment brilliant, the next merely flashy; one day quite firm, another day soft.”

This declaration of ambivalence, which appears in a temperate article first published in Art and Culture(1961), is a radical revision of an enthusiastic review originally written more than a decade earlier. The shift bears out the truth of Greenberg’s opening sentence quoted above and offers graphic evidence of the instability of the celebrated critic’s view of this most perplexing of Impressionist painters. At first, Greenberg seemed predisposed to like Renoir, perhaps influenced by the high opinion of the painter held by Meier-Graefe, whom