RENOIR [K]

[Footnote K: _Renoir_. Par Albert André. Crès et Cie.]

Renoir is the greatest painter alive. [L] There are admirers of Matisse
and admirers of Picasso who will contradict that, though the artists
themselves would probably agree. Also, there are admirers of M.
Bouguereau and of Sir Marcus Stone, there are Italian Futurists and
members of the New English Art Club, with whom one bandies no words.
Renoir is the greatest painter alive.

[Footnote L: This essay was written in 1919. He died in 1920.]

He is over forty: to be exact, he is seventy-seven years old. Yet, in
the teeth of modern theories that have at least the air of physiological
certainties, one must admit that he is still alive. A comparison between
the five-and-thirty photographs reproduced by M. Besson and those at the
end of Herr Meier-Graefe's monograph suggests that even since 1910 his
art has developed. But what is certain is that, during his last period,
since 1900 that is to say, though so crippled by rheumatism that it is
with agonizing difficulty he handles a brush, he has produced works that
surpass even the masterpieces of his middle age.

Renoir was born in 1841, and in '54 bound prentice to a china-painter. A
fortunate invention deprived him of this means of livelihood and drove
him into oil. He escaped early from the École des Beaux-Arts, and, of
course, came under the influence of Courbet. By 1863 he was being duly
refused at the Salon and howled at by the respectable mob. He thus made