Renoir on Beauty

The Swing (1876)

George Bernard Shaw once observed that the secret to staying young was to remain young at heart. In this painting the French impressionist Renoir appears to be making a similar observation. As Shaw put it: “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing."

We see a young woman about to get on a swing. She’s smiling, and appears only slightly hesitant, perhaps because she’s wearing a long summer dress. She’s watched by two men ( left: fellow artist Norbert Gounette, and on the right Renoir’s brother Edmond), and a young child. The woman is a model named Jeanne Samary. The painting was created outdoors in what are now the Montmartre museum gardens in Paris. Renoir had rented a cottage nearby, hoping to paint scenes taken directly from life.

It’s a pretty painting, and deliberately so. Renoir argued that artists should be unafraid to paint something beautiful. He believed that in so doing they made the world a slightly better place. In his own words:

“To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.”

Such scenes were often dismissed by critics as mere decorative pastiche. And yet Renoir wanted to paint the beauty he saw in daily life. For him it was not a cliché, but a way of finding grace and beauty within the everyday, what he called “making love with his brush.”

Consider, for example, this “pretty” painting featuring people carrying their umbrellas. It is simply titled “Umbrellas”.

These paintings depict the beauty of the everyday. They display an almost photographic composition, with Renoir enjoying the way in which the world around us can yield moments of striking clarity and beauty.

And in so doing he tacitly encourages us to look around and see the world with curiosity and wonder. And perhaps this, more than anything, is what it means to remain young at heart. As Kafka observed, “anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

Julian

Thank you for reading my newsletter. If you’d like to support my work please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!