_Moulin de la Galette_ (1876), and _M. Choquet_--"portrait d'un fou
par un fou," Renoir calls it--pictures of ravishing loveliness to set
dancing every chord in a spectator of normal sensibility. Also, it is a
period that has an extraordinary charm for the literary connoisseur. It
throws glamour over the "seventies," and, for that matter, on to the
"eighties." Here are the characters of Flaubert and Maupassant as we
should wish them to be. That _déjeuner_ by the Seine was probably
organized by the resourceful Jean de Servigny, and there, sure enough,
is Yvette with a fringe. The purest of painters becomes historical by
accident. He expresses the unalloyed sensibility of an artist in terms
of delicious contemporary life and gives us, adventitiously, romance. A
fascinating period, but not the great one.

Towards the end of 1881 Renoir set out on a tour in Italy, and, as if
to show how little he was affected by what he found there, painted
at Naples a large and important _Baigneuse_ (now in the Durand-Ruel
collection) in which I can discover not the slightest trace of Italian
influence. He is too thorough a Frenchman to be much of anything else.
The emphatic statement and counter-statement of the great Primitives
is not in his way. He prefers to insinuate. Even in his most glorious
moments he is discreet and tactful, fonder of a transition than an
opposition, never passionate. The new thing that came into his art about
this time, and was to affect it for the next twenty years, was not Italy
but Ingres.

The influence was at first an unhappy one. During three or four years,
unable, it seems, to match the new conception of form with his intensely
personal reaction, Renoir produced a certain number of unconvincing and
uncharacteristic pictures (_e.g._, the dance series, _Dance à la Ville_,
etc.). There is an uneasy harshness about the contours, the forms are