What is it about Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)—especially his late works? The public can be made misty-eyed by his rose-lipped children and full-fleshed blonde bathers, but today’s sophisticated art lovers usually declare their immunity to the charms of such images, as if admitting to a taste for snub-nosed kids and ample bathers with luminous skin and heavy hair were a sign of aesthetic weakness. Some will reluctantly own to a general affection for the sun-dappled urban pleasures, both working class and bourgeois, of Renoir’s paintings of the 1870s and early 1880s—a domesticated Parisian Arcadia that’s hard to resist—or allow that they find a few select pictures appealing.
But even those who admit a weakness for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’s large painting of a shy shop girl in the arms of a young man, Dance at Bougival (1882–3), or the Phillips Collection’s summer idyll, Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1)—“well, those paintings are delicious”—resist the heightened seductions of the works made after 1890, with their intensified palette and their compressed, burgeoning forms (“All those fat orange women!”). Dislike of Renoir’s late works is widespread. The Museum of Modern Art had no qualms, not too long ago, about deaccessioning a large 1902 reclining nude, acquired with some fanfare in the 1950s, in order to purchase (an admittedly wonderful) Vincent van Gogh portrait of the postman, Roulin.
Renoir—even late Renoir—was once regarded very differently. In his influential Modern Art(first published in English in 1908), the perceptive German critic
