Outdoor Impressionism, the art of enveloping a subject in an atmosphere of shimmering and clean color, was the joint creation of Pierre Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet. During the early 1870's these two artists developed a method of bringing together little spots of unmixed color that would reinforce each other. This produced a highly light-charged, flickering, and momentary "impression" of the object viewed. In its concern with the function of natural light, this art parallels the painting of Edouard Manet. In actual method, however, it substitutes tiny spots of pure color (as it comes from the tube) for the broad flat color areas of the older painter.

Renoir and Monet, as well as Pissarro and Sisley, represent a joyous, even lyrical approach to reality that belies the actual appearance of late nineteenth-century Paris. The city and its suburbs are given a pleasurable, colorful, and richly vibrating quality. Yet, since their technique was a deviation from the accepted form, their pictures were scorned by the critics and public of that day. Their art, which is the most pleasant pictorial interpretation of modern life, remained outside the conventional art world for almost a generation. Following on the heels of the Manet scandals, the new Impressionist pictures were also the victims of organized hostility. Intolerant criticisms, music hall skits, newspaper ridicule, and political defamation took their usual course.

Renoir's fully developed style is broader in scope than the outdoor Impressionist method he evolved with Monet. His art is steeped in the tradition of the great masters; Titian, Rubens, Fragonard; indeed of all who have celebrated the joy of living in general and the beauty of women in particular. He represents a fusion of old and new techniques. Unlike the usual outdoor Impressionist paintings whose figures often tend to be lost in a haze of shimmering atmospheric color, his works are substantial in form and design.

Renoir was the son of a poor tailor who had brought his family from Limoges to Paris when the boy was four. At the age of thirteen he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter from whom he may have acquired his taste for the brilliant blues he used in his later work. In the shop he copied pretty flowers and figures, while in his spare time he did sketches from classical sculptures at the Louvre. He was ready to become a professional porcelain painter at seventeen, but a mechanical method for doing the work was invented and he was out of a job. He turned to the painting of fans, doing scenes from Watteau, Fragonard, and Boucher. At twenty he quit this commercial career and began serious study at the studio of Gleyre, where he met a number of his future Impressionist associates.

So many of their works were rejected by the official salon jury that the young men organized their own exhibition in 1874. To this show, Renoir sent the now famous The Loge (below), one of his most beautiful and most typical works. Its appeal lies in the way the painter has portrayed the sense of well-being that radiates from the good looking well-dressed couple seated in an opera box. We are placed slightly above them and a bit to the side, in what is known as "vantage point perspective." This deliberately unbalanced and spontaneous way of looking at the subject is characteristic of the Impressionist desire to convey an unexpected and casual effect. The notion of the man holding up a glass to his eyes and hiding his face from the spectator was considered quite daring, yet it is a "real" touch as well as a momentarily arrested gesture. He will soon lower his arm and turn to the lady or to the stage; his action will be part of a continuous series of events. It is as though all motion has stopped, enabling the painter to catch a fleeting action.

All these things; the perspective, the quickly seized action, the spontaneity, are part of the Impressionist idea. From a compositional aspect there are other things to note. Renoir has placed these two incompletely seen figures in a tiny space, just as Titian did in his Venus with a Mirror. The color shows the effect of the new brilliant color system, especially in the pinks and light blues but the blacks in the gentleman's dress jacket and the stripes on the lady's gown are those of the Venetian painters, especially Veronese.

The Oarsmen at Chatou is a characteristic example of Renoir's outdoor painting. He chooses the usual scene of vacationing or picnicking along the Seine or in a little spot in the woods. Young good-looking people (he never shows any other kind) are about to get into the skiff. We are slightly above and to the left. Between us and the distant shore is a continuous shimmer of lavender color that envelopes the entire picture in its atmosphere. It ties together the various parts which otherwise do not show any particular compositional arrangement. The figures stand still, as though bemused, in a typically lyrical and pleasant suspension of action. This is Renoir's particular poetry.

Much as he likes to paint scenes of young people rowing, dining, dancing, or lounging about, his favorite subject is the nude. Young Woman in the Sun is one of dozens of pictures on this theme. It is a vibrant colorful song of the flesh, frankly sensuous, even pagan, but never sly or underhand. A full round form emerges from the shimmering foliage with immense strength and clarity, with a palpable love of skin, flesh and youthful tender beauty. A century earlier Fragonard had shown a similar feeling for shimmering iridescent movement about his nudes.

Here and in many other pictures, Renoir has brought the old masters up to date, as it were. He has combined their sense of largeness, their vitality, with his own equally deep feeling for the same kind of beauty and with the color of the modern school.