Pierre-Auguste Renoir: “The painting is learned in museums”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

In the Mind of Great Artists

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“The painting is learned in museums”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir

 

It’s a wonderfully controversial phrase for an impressionist painter. And Renoir is a true emblem of impressionism.

Why do we say “controversial”? Precisely because the impressionists sought direct experience with things and light, refusing to represent things in the manner taught in the academy. “Direct experience” means, for example, that you do not paint a tree the way you are told in a classroom that a tree is; you rather go see that tree personally and then paint it.

Fortunately, he clearly articulated the rationale behind his idea, which was perhaps in opposition to that of the other artists who revolutionized painting by working outdoors.

First of all, it is important to know that the Renoir family lived near the Louvre, and as a child, he used to go there all the time to play with his friends in the museum’s courtyards, or to contemplate the statues, or to be fascinated by Delacroix’s paintings.

This is how he told it: “When I was a boy, I often went into the galleries of ancient sculpture, without even knowing precisely why. Perhaps because I passed through the courtyards of the Louvre every day, because it was easy to get into those halls, and because there was never anyone there. I stayed there for hours, lost in day-dreams.”

And he clarified: “When I say that in the Louvre you learn to paint, I don’t mean that you have to dig into the varnish of the paintings to catch their tricks and do Rubens’ or Raphael’s paintings again. Each one has to make the painting of his time. But in the museum, one finds the taste for painting, which nature alone cannot give. One does not say, ‘I want to be a painter’ before a beautiful landscape, but before a painting.”

 

Image: The Swing (1876)

 

Recommended links:

Renoir’s Impressionism and an Essential Characteristic.

Characteristic Elements of Impressionist Painting.

“One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism.”

Fundamental Paintings to Understand the History of Painting: Luncheon of the Boating Party, Renoir.

Six paintings: Renoir and Aline.

Impressionism in 5 points.

The Umbrellas.

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