Books: Sanity and Sun

RENOIR, MY FATHER (458 pp.]—Jean Renoir—Little, Brown ($8.95).

No biography in years has been as warm and likable as this recollection of the great impressionist painter Renoir by his son Jean. The younger Renoir posed for his father constantly as a child; now, turned portraitist, he has done a remarkable job of sketching a gentle genius. Pierre-Auguste Renoir is lucky in his biographer; his son, a playwright and film director (The River) shows none of the radiation damage that sons of geniuses sometimes display.

Without Thunder. In his son’s recounting, Renoir was the sanest and sunniest of men. His biography is a powerful antidote for the notion—acquired, perhaps, from reading biographies of Van Gogh and Gauguin—that art must spring from anguish. Not that Renoir had an easy time; at the beginning of his career his paintings were ridiculed along with those of other impressionists, and at the end of it he was twisted by a rheumatic paralysis that made each brush stroke an effort of will. What was so unusual about Renoir was the grace with which he bore the weight of genius. He married once and well, reigned without thunder as the head of a large, adoring household, and could always take time to speak to a stranger or persuade a beggar to accept a gift. He was, of course, frequently taken advantage of; after his paintings began to sell, chiselers took up the habit of bringing obvious Renoir forgeries to his door, knowing that he would obligingly “correct”—that is. repaint—the canvases and give them back. The painter saw through the racket, or always claimed later that he did, but it was easier for him to paint a Renoir than become indignant at a swindler. The only irritants that instantly roused him to anger were those of modernity: traffic noise, foul air, the displacement of craftsmanship by machine production.

The painter was an anthology of quirks —he always wore a hat because he was convinced that the sun’s ultraviolet light beating into the skull would destroy the ability to distinguish between nuances of grey; he ordered that the friendly spiders which abounded in his studio should not be disturbed (the maids hid behind the coal pile the mop used for brushing down spiderwebs). He was a patient and humorous father; explaining the meaning of duty to his son, he would recall his own boyhood as a tailor’s son. “I had to shell green peas and I loathed it. But I knew that it was part of my life. If I hadn’t shelled the peas, my father would have had to, and he would not have been able to deliver on time the suit he was making for his customer, and the earth would have stopped turning, much to the shame of Galileo . . .”

Something More. Renoir adored women, as is evident from the multitude of round, rosy nudes he painted. It is no surprise to learn that his household was full of them. He put aside his broad palette of art student’s love affairs when he married, but his relations with the maids, nurses and models who crowded the house, as his son observes, were always “on the point of turning into something more romantic.”

The struggle with paralysis ended one day in 1919 when Renoir was 76. Kept to his room at the end by a lung infection, he worked for several hours on a still-life of anemones, then motioned for someone to take the brush from his stiffened hand. “I think,” he said, as he looked at what was to be his last painting, “I am beginning to understand something about it.”