Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
Another blockbuster show is coming. Renoir. A big one, this time. Drawings. Over a hundred of them at the Morgan Library in New York, then off to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The press release lands, full of the usual stuff. A leader of the Impressionist school. Spontaneity and modernity. The delights of being young and in love in Paris.
And you read it, and you think… alright. We know. Renoir is popular. He’s the king of feel-good, chocolate-box art. The stuff you see on biscuit tins and calendars. He’s the painter of dappled sunlight and plump, rosy-cheeked women. He’s nice.
But Renoir’s drawings? Does anyone really care?
That’s the question, isn’t it? His paintings are legendary, but his works on paper are practically unknown. The last major exhibition of them was in 1921. A hundred years ago. Why? What does this show actually tell us that we don’t already know?
At first, you hear ‘Renoir drawings’ and you just assume it’s a completist thing. A show for the real die-hards. The B-sides and the outtakes. But then you look at what they’re actually doing here. They’re not just hanging a load of sketches on the wall. They’re putting the drawings next to the paintings. The big, famous ones. They’re reuniting The Great Bathers with all seven of its preparatory drawings. They’re putting Dance in the Country next to the sketches that built it.
And suddenly, it’s not just a collection of drawings. It’s an argument.
The whole popular idea of Impressionism, the story we’ve been sold for a century and a half, is that it was all about capturing a fleeting moment. Artists rushing out into the fields, working directly from nature, no preliminary sketches. Just pure, unadulterated sensation slapped onto a canvas. And Renoir, for a time, was right there in the thick of it.
But this show tells a different, much more complicated story.
It’s a bit like being shown a perfectly iced cake, and then being taken into the kitchen afterwards. The one that’s still covered in flour, with eggshells in the bin and a smear of butter on the wall. The finished thing is lovely, but the kitchen is where the real work happened. This show is the kitchen.
You see in these drawings that the paintings weren’t just happy accidents of light and colour. They were constructed. Deliberated over. Fought with. He called the drawings his ‘research’. His ‘material’. That’s the language of a worker, not a magician. You see him figuring things out, changing his mind, wrestling with form and composition. The final painting might look effortless, but the drawings show you the effort. The scaffolding.
And this is where it gets really interesting. Because after his main Impressionist phase in the 1870s, he makes a conscious decision to return to a more traditional way of working. He starts making preparatory drawings again. He starts using red chalk, like the old masters. He starts thinking about line and structure, not just light and atmosphere.
Why? The curator, Colin Bailey, says you can see the ‘struggle’, the ‘experimentation’. And you can. You can see an artist who has mastered a certain kind of beautiful, spontaneous painting, and then starts to feel like it’s not enough. You can see him deliberately making things harder for himself. He wanted to get back to the bones of the thing.
I remember seeing his paintings for the first time as a student. And if I’m honest, I hated them. So sugary. So… nice. It felt like art with all the difficult bits sanded off. There was no grit, no anxiety. Just endless sunny afternoons. And for a certain kind of art lover, that’s precisely the appeal. It’s joyful, it’s optimistic. It doesn’t ask too much of you.
But this exhibition suggests that maybe we’ve had it wrong all this time. Or at least, that we’ve only been looking at half the picture. The joy and the optimism in the final paintings weren’t just a default setting. They were an achievement. Something he had to build, piece by piece, out of charcoal and chalk and ink.
Look at the drawings of his wife and son. The portraits he did on commission to make a living. These aren’t just fleeting impressions. They are careful, considered studies of people. He was a grafter. A man who started out painting designs on porcelain plates and never lost that sense of craft.
So what’s the point of this show, then? Is it going to make the people who already love Renoir love him even more? Probably. But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is what it might do for the rest of us. The sceptics.
It doesn’t ask you to suddenly fall in love with the rosy nudes or the boating parties. It just asks you to look again. To look past the blossom and see the branch. To understand that behind the most seemingly effortless beauty, there is almost always a messy, complicated, and deeply human process of trial and error.
This show doesn’t make Renoir a more difficult artist. But it does make him a more interesting one. It gives him back his grit. And for that, it’s more than worth a look. It’s necessary.
