Original subtitles

Welcome to Great Art.

For the past few years,

we've been filming the biggest exhibitions,

art galleries and museums in the world

about some of the greatest artists and art in history.

Not only do we record landmark shows

but we also secure privileged access behind the scenes,

and then use this as a springboard

to take a broader look at extraordinary artists.

These films play first in the cinema as Exhibition On Screen

then we reversion for television.

In Philadelphia, in the United States,

there is an absolute treasure trove of a gallery

called the Barnes Foundation.

The founder, a wealthy chemist, sunk his money

into some of the greatest art available to him at the time.

On his death, he decreed that the collection could never travel

or be loaned out in part, so to see it,

you have to go to the city itself.

And within the gallery walls, you can gaze upon the works

of Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Modigliani, Cezanne, Monet,

but above all, one artist who divides opinion -

Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Some love him, some don't.

Albert Barnes certainly did

and he put together the world's largest collection

of Renoir's paintings, 181 in total,

particularly his later works. It's a remarkable story

and Renoir is certainly a pivotal painter.

It makes for a great film in this episode of Great Art.

MUSIC: 'Beau Soir' by Claude Debussy

# Lorsque au soleil couchant

# Les rivieres

# Sont roses

# Et qu'un tiede frisson

# Court sur les champs de ble

# Un conseil d'etre

# Heureux semble sortir des choses

# Et monter

# Vers le coeur trouble

# Un conseil de gouter

# Le charme d'etre au monde

# Cependant qu'on est jeune

# Et que le soir est beau

# Car nous nous en allons

# Comme s'en va cette onde

# Elle a la mer

# Nous au

# Tombeau. #

We are in one of the galleries of the Barnes Foundation

and we are looking at a wall that is composed entirely

of works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Albert Barnes was obsessed with Renoir.

He was his favourite painter.

He collected 181 works by this artist.

It's the biggest collection in the world.

So when you come to the Barnes, you are seeing Renoir constantly.

They are not the Renoirs that most people think of

when they think of Renoir.

Barnes was much more attracted to the works from Renoir's late period,

the things that he produced after he broke with impressionism,

from 1890 roughly up until the time of his death in 1919.

I think they tend to be kind of suppressed in the history of art.

You don't see them written about very much,

you don't see them exhibited very much.

But then you come to the Barnes,

and that is primarily the Renoir that you are getting,

this kind of unknown Renoir.

This period in Renoir's career

I think has really been misunderstood.

A lot of critics and scholars tend to dismiss it.

I guess I'm still, sort of, horrified by Renoir.

I remember the first time I came here,

looking at the sheer number of them and thinking

"Why is there so much bad Renoir here?"

Why so many of these small, negligible Renoirs?

Why so many, kind of, repeated images? What was he after?

And I have to say I had a kind of visceral reaction.

I think, though, after pondering it

that Barnes himself has a kind of visceral reaction,

it's the opposite one.

As much as I am, sort of, revolted by Renoir,

Barnes seems to be kind of in love with Renoir.

Artists don't necessarily gravitate towards his work,

especially the later work.

And yet artists like Matisse and Picasso

were so deeply enamoured of his work,

and to make matters even more problematic,

it seems like the public fully embraces his work,

they love it.

And yet I'd be hard-pressed to find other artists,

painters in particular, who gravitate towards his work

or would put him in a top ten list

so I think therein lies the paradox of Renoir.

I think that our experience of Renoir has been conditioned

by the kind of over-simplification and, I think, cheapening

of Renoir's aesthetic and expressive achievements in popular culture.

So I think the most important thing we can do

when we look at this unequalled collection of work by Renoir

is to try to recover what that work meant to Renoir

and what it meant in the contexts in which it was created.

I think that it's wrong to dismiss this period.

I think that we really need to go back

and kind of reassess what's going on during Renoir's late period.

They are actually very complicated works

and I think that they are very important for 20th century art.

My father, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, was born in 1841.

His father was a tailor,

and Pierre-Auguste would use his tailor's chalk

to draw on the floor.

My grandfather got annoyed, but thought the figures

that his son sketched all over the apartment floor

were "not bad at all".

From the age of 13 to 18,

Renoir had a job painting the borders on plates,

which were fairly easy.

He was so proficient that he was soon promoted

to the historical portraits in the centre.

Renoir got into the habit of going to the Louvre at noon

instead of lunching with his friends

in a little cafe around the corner.

He told me, "I added Fragonard to my list of favourites,

"which already included Watteau and Boucher.

"Rousseau amazed me... and Daubigny also...

"..but I realized immediately that the really great painter was Corot.

"I also loved Diaz.

"He was someone I could grasp.

"I said to myself that if I were a painter,

"I would have liked to paint the way he did.

"I like a forest scene

"that makes you feel there is water somewhere near.

"And in Diaz's paintings you can almost smell the mushrooms,

"dead leaves and moss."

My father decided to study painting

in one of the recognized art schools.

In other words, Renoir crossed his Rubicon

and resolved to become a professional artist.

He was little under 20 at the time.

He said, "In spite of the teachers, the discipline of having

"to copy the same anatomical model ten times is excellent.

"It's boring, and if you weren't paying for it,

"you wouldn't bother to do it,

"but the Louvre is really the only place to learn."

"And while I was at Gleyre's studio,

"the Louvre, for me, meant Delacroix."

He is academically trained at this point, with Gleyre

in Gleyre's studio. It is a pretty electric decade.

Ingres and Delacroix die in the 1860s

and so everybody is trying to figure out

what will the future of French painting be.

The two giants of avant-garde painting

are Edouard Manet and Gustave Courbet

and all the young painters are looking to them.

And so you see here, in this picture,

Renoir moving through that influence.

Renoir is trying to find his voice, basically.

The nude in the 1860s really is the contested motif

for avant-garde painting.

So you think about Courbet

and the nudes he is doing in the 1860s,

and then of course you think about Manet and Olympia

and Le Dejeuner Sur L'Herbe.

So all of this radical experimentation is taking place

in the locus of the naked female body.

And so Renoir is taking this on.

It is this model that he has been working with

for several years named Lise Trehot.

It really is Lise Trehot, it's her body and her face.

And so what artists are doing

with the great genre of the idealised female nude,

which has been in place for centuries,

is really turning that upside down.

So it's a real woman,

and that was too radical for the Salon jury to deal with.

Renoir, for me, is someone who is self-deprecating,

occasionally ironic, well read,

culturally very astute, but somewhat modest,

someone who does not suffer fools gladly

and who has great joy in being around beautiful and smart people.

My father, Renoir, and fellow student Bazille

began to get together a group of artists.

There was Sisley, the son of an English businessman...

..and Monet, who had so much self-assurance

that he soon became their leader.

Pissarro, ten years older than Renoir,

careless in his dress, but not his words.

He was to be the theorist of the new school.

The critics were harsh.

"These self-styled artists take canvas, paints and brushes,

"splash a few daubs of colour about, and sign the result.

"It is a horrible spectacle."

One wrote,

"Just try to persuade Monsieur Pissarro that trees are not purple

"or the sky the colour of butter...

"..tell Degas about drawing, execution,

"and he will laugh in your face.

"Try and explain to Monsieur Renoir

"that a woman's torso is not a mass of rotting flesh

"with violet-toned green spots all over it,

"indicating a corpse in the last stages of decay."

"We," Renoir said, "had only one fixed idea -

"to exhibit our work, show our canvases everywhere

"until we could reach the real public.

"I mean the public not dulled by 'official' art.

"We were sure they existed somewhere."

"The critics have always been mistaken.

"They reviled Delacroix, Goya and Corot.

"If they had praised us, we might have been worried.

"The only thing we got out of that exhibition

"was the label 'impressionism', a name I loathe," said Renoir.

"Without the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel

"we wouldn't have survived."

My father was thinking more of his very physical survival

than the survival of their art.

"Enthusiasm is all very well," he said,

"but it doesn't fill an empty stomach."

Early on, he is very much thinking about his market.

He is doing lots of portrait commissions.

Durand-Ruel, his dealer, is encouraging certain kinds

of saleable pictures and Renoir says,

"I want to sell paintings."

We've learnt quite recently about the impact

that the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel made in New York in 1886

when he brought over 200-odd paintings by the impressionists

and managed to sell quite a few of them.

And, gradually, as the gilded age unfurls

and robber barons and great magnates like Frick, like Carnegie,

like Rockefeller, like Morgan have established fortunes,

established residences.

In a way, they have had some time now and leisure

to look at art and are moved in different ways

by different forms of art.

And so it's an extraordinary story how Dr Barnes opens his eyes

to the modern movement, and in a way

that no museum or no other collector is quite doing,

begins to amass a collection.

And gradually, once he establishes the trust of the dealers,

he is offered often first and he's smart enough to buy first.

He was a chemist and he was very creative.

He came up with a medicine that didn't exist before.

He had a business

and it was the only one of its kind in the world.

So, he made a lot of money, he was a multi-millionaire.

I think in the beginning he was trying

to collect the artists that he really loved.

But once he established the Barnes Foundation,

it became a teaching collection.

He'd already, at this time, started classes

in the factory with his workers

and that was really fundamentally what caused him

to start the Barnes Foundation.

So up until 1922, it was his personal collection.

Once the Barnes Foundation was established,

the work was moved in '24, teaching started in '24,

it officially opened in '25. From that point forward,

the art collection was for the students.

He wanted to have a good selection of works from all the traditions,

all periods of time and all cultures.

The more he learned about art,

the more sophisticated he became and that affected his collecting.

When we think of impressionist works,

we tend to think about technique.

I think that's what comes to mind

when people think about impressionism.

The loose brushwork, the light,

but it's also about subjects.

The impressionists painted the modern city

and scenes of leisure,

people strolling down the new boulevards,

and people sitting at cafes, and people going to the ballet,

and all these scenes of very animated life in this new Paris.

I think we are really looking at the high point,

perhaps the end point, of his impressionist career.

This painting was completed in 1881,

and included in the seventh Impressionist Exhibition.

I always think of this

as an impressionist version of the history painting.

I mean, history painting has the great battle scenes

or the great mythological scenes.

Here, he takes the scene of ordinary life,

of his friends and colleagues and the restaurant owner

and the boaters gathered together on the terrace of a restaurant

in a little town west of Paris,

but he gives it this incredible scale and size and aspiration.

So we're really seeing Renoir with his full capacity

as a great painter, a great impressionist painter.

He's still playing with flickering light.

You see that in the landscape in the background,

which fills the upper left corner of the painting.

You certainly see it in his fabulous still life

which is the focal point of the foreground -

all of the bottles and the bits and pieces,

the detritus of this lunch that the group has been enjoying.

In terms of technique, I was reflecting

on some of his famous paintings

from maybe five or ten years earlier.

The Balancoire - where it's much more

of a sort of flickering, gestural application of paint.

And here I think it's slightly more finished,

so maybe we see him shifting or drifting

towards his later, more classical style.

But you do have a sense of an artist in full confidence

and in full control of his capacities.

And the fullness of the painting allows us

to argue that this is the height of an achievement.

MUSIC: 'La-Bas, Vers L'Eglise' by Maurice Ravel

# La-bas, vers l'eglise

# Vers l'eglise Ayio Sidero

# L'eglise, o Vierge sainte... #

This is one of the paintings by Renoir

that I love the most in the Barnes Foundation,

and I think part of it is that I see his struggle

in painting the picture.

This feels like he's really working it out as he's painting it.

I personally love a painting

where not all the decisions are completely nailed down.

To me, the painting feels alive because he stopped.

There are underworked elements of it and overworked elements of it

and I feel he's wrestling with it, and he's really present with it,

trying to do something maybe that he doesn't yet know how to do.

And I think the best paintings that artists make

are the ones they do when they still don't know how to do them.

Once they figure out how to do them, it's really dangerous

because they can just start turning out a product

because they know the moves.

I love the differentiation of touch in this painting.

Sometimes I think his later work, for example,

can feel that it was just painted with a cotton swab or a squeegee

whereas the brush strokes here just keep me engaged.

And I love that about it because, as a painter,

this is the painting that makes me want to run home and paint.

MUSIC: 'C - Deux Poemes De Louis Aragon' by Francis Poulenc

# J'ai traverse les ponts de Ce

# C'est la que tout a commence

# Une chanson des temps passes

# Parle d'un chevalier blesse... #

At a certain point after Renoir has been painting

in this impressionist mode and exhibiting with the impressionists,

he decides to really change his work.

This very distinct shift happens,

and this in the early to mid-1880s.

He says, looking back at this period,

"I realised I had taken impressionism

"as far as it could go."

And he started to think that...

impressionism was too much about surface appearance and ephemerality.

What he thought art should be about was searching for something

that was more eternal and more solid.

And so, in 1881, he goes to Italy

to study Renaissance painting, to study ancient frescoes,

and it really changes his work.

He exchanges impressionist fleetingness and spontaneity

for something much more stable,

much more, kind of, composed and monumental

and you're seeing that in this work here.

It shows Renoir's wife, Aline Renoir,

with their first son, Pierre.

It's an incredibly just tender painting,

especially when you look closely.

I love the way that her lips are kind of resting on Pierre's cheek.

They are perfectly centred. They are monumental.

He is almost doing a Raphael here.

There's a certain grace and kind of simplicity to it.

In terms of the technique,

it has almost kind of a matte appearance,

and that's because he's really thinking about fresco at this time.

He's not painting on a wall.

I mean, he's not actually doing a fresco,

but he wants this oil painting to have the appearance of fresco.

There are a few other works in the collection

that are from this time period - the mid-1880s,

but the big, kind of, manifesto work from this period

is at the Philadelphia Museum Of Art.

It's this Large Bathers, which he displayed publicly in 1887,

and it was not well received at the time.

This is the great problem picture of Renoir's career.

The one painting he worked on longer than any other, almost four years.

The painting for which there are more preparatory studies

than any other, the painting he sweated over more than any other.

And that's because he was at a point in his career

where he wanted to make a great statement,

and, as it were, earn a place in the museum.

The painting took more than three years to complete.

There are several reasons why.

One is that he was using a very dry oil paint,

a paint from which he'd removed most of the oil

therefore it went on very, very slowly

and that's what gives the picture its dry look.

Another was the complication of the gestures,

the movements of the figures and bringing them together

in a realistic way. It was clearly very hard for him

and that's why he had to keep moving back and forth

from preparatory studies to the canvas itself.

The reception this painting received

when it was finally shown in 1887 was decidedly mixed.

Some of his impressionist friends like Pissarro were very disappointed

that he had gone back to paint in such an old-fashioned manner.

It's certainly one of the great thighs in art,

the right thigh of that woman drawing back

takes up a very large part of the canvas.

And when you look at it you see the utter subtlety,

the nuances of colour.

It's very far from a flat area of paint.

There are about 20 colours just playing back and forth,

so it's a kind of bravura display of painting skill.

This is perhaps the pivotal, the key painting in Renoir's career.

Before it, came all of the innovations of impressionism,

then he began to think maybe impressionism wasn't enough.

He wanted to create a more solid art, an art of the museum.

This is his experiment, his attempt to reach it.

He found it very difficult to do, and the subject matter,

the timeless nude in a landscape, would remain constant

for the rest of his career.

So he rejects impressionism

and he paints in this very, kind of, dry,

controlled manner where you can't see the brushwork at all.

Then he kind of finds his way back to impressionism

and in the late works, and by "late" I mean after 1890,

we don't call them his impressionist works any more,

but he does kind of go back

to a kind of impressionistic loose handling of paint.

He thins down his paints with turpentine

so that they become really drippy.

He applies layers and layers of thin paint,

so that the layers kind of show through each other,

and also the canvas comes through too.

And the weave of the canvas actually is an important part

of the tactility that some of these nudes have.

He works pretty quickly,

and he doesn't map out the painting ahead of time,

but he kind of lets the image emerge.

Essoyes, east of Paris, was my mother's native village.

My mother now wanted Renoir to spend the summer months there

as she sensed his travelling days were over.

The only thing Renoir feared in Essoyes was his mother-in-law.

"A pest", he called her.

In Essoyes, I spent the best years of my childhood.

And my father felt well whenever he was there,

covering his canvasses in colour.

The models lived in the attic, paid to stay with us.

Often, when they were not posing,

they would ask my mother if they could help in some way in the house.

They would step down from being Venus on Olympus

to pressing my trousers or mending socks.

So clever with the dappled sunlight.

Is she smiling? Is she smirking?

I'm gonna go smiling.

HE CHUCKLES

Cezanne, Cezanne,

Renoir, Renoir.

Double balance. Yeah.

I like the ones that go together. You mean like the pairs?

The two ladies on the beach, like, the four naked ladies.

There are a lot of naked ladies around.

Yeah, needs some more naked men. SHE LAUGHS

It's like this sweeping landscape.

It's ethereal, beautiful.

Yeah, like that one right there is sort of a... Ah, yes.

The proportions don't necessarily... The Renoir buns.

Like, her little body, it almost looks too big for...

Or because in our day and age

we just naturally discriminate against large-bodied women. Maybe.

Well, then women were round.

Yeah, that looks like a nice Sunday, you know? That's cool.

Now, who is he courting?

You see that's what they would do, right?

Oh, yeah.

Gradually, as Renoir becomes fatigued

by his experience of living in Paris, the Franco-Prussian war,

the experience of living through the commune and so forth,

we see him retreat both physically,

where he spends less and less time in Paris proper,

but also I think in some ways psychologically and emotionally.

He looks to nature,

and he looks to a kind of expression of pastoral experience

or Arcadian idyll that really is about withdrawal,

it's about a retreat, it's about internal experience,

it's about fantasy.

We first began going regularly to the south coast

for my father's health.

Little did we know that this promised land

would become the Coney Island of Europe.

In my father's day,

Cagnes-sur-Mer was a thriving village of prosperous peasants

who went from one to the other on their little donkeys,

unhurried and never wearing out the animals, the land or themselves.

Renoir had gone several times to paint a property which enchanted him

because of its beautiful 500-year-old olive trees

and little farm.

It was called Les Collettes. He purchased it.

It seems that the different places Renoir lived in,

ever since his childhood,

coincided with the evolution of his genius.

Les Collettes was the perfect setting for his final period.

MUSIC: 'Soupir' by Maurice Ravel

# Mon ame vers ton front ou reve

# O calme souer

# Un automne jonche

# De taches de rousseur

# Et vers le ciel errant

# De ton oeil angelique

# Monte, comme dans un jardin

# Melancolique

# Fidele

# Un blanc jet d'eau

# Soupire vers l'Azur... #

I think that painting the same subject over and over

allowed him to really experiment with form and colour.

I think he was an artist that was more interested

in the properties of paint than he was in anything

that a particular subject might say.

What some people react to

is that those late works really do look too decorative.

There's not much of a narrative going on.

I think that a lot of it has to do with

how, kind of, sweet-looking the paintings are.

And I think what we've come to expect out of modern painting

is something that's difficult and challenging and subversive,

and they don't properly fit into that definition.

But sort of in defence of Renoir,

I would say wasn't Matisse doing the same thing?

Matisse was, sort of, all about design and decorativeness,

but nobody really attacks him for it.

The critical reception in the latter part of the 20th century,

much of it was really shaped by a kind of feminist discourse

that understands the kind of passive

and apparently sexually available nudes of late Renoir as problematic.

SPEAKING FRENCH

You know, when you look at the different periods of Renoir,

I think it's easiest to make your peace with the early Renoir.

As you go forward in time,

you want to see what's good about those paintings carry through

and to my mind it doesn't.

He moves away from what seems to me a kind of honesty

in those early paintings.

He certainly moves away from the experimentation

of the earlier impressionist works and he gets to his comfort zone.

And his comfort zone, to me, are these, kind of, bovine women

with stupid expressions on their faces,

women without a thought in their head,

and that ultimately is the problem.

The kind of sexual exploitation

that you might see in early Renoir by the end becomes an indifference

to the psychological existence of women that is truly appalling.

I think that Renoir is interested in flesh

not just for its erotic potential,

but because it's a place where he can really evoke tactility

and he does that with fabric too.

If you look at his bathers, they're always touching something,

whether it's their own hair or the fabric around them,

or their arms, so he's constantly invoking the sense of touch.

To say that all these paintings are about

is the objectification of women is a bit narrow.

My father said,

"What is more eternal than the human body?

"By portraying it unclothed,

"the artist avoids an element that is based on titillation.

"I mean the pornographic.

"The body excites the senses only when its nakedness

"is revealed bit by bit after having first been seen fully clothed."

He was afraid that young listeners might get the stupid idea

that very natural things are smutty.

Renoir often spoke of that "state of grace,

"which comes from contemplating God's most beautiful creation,

"the human body."

He added, "For my personal taste, the female body."

Someday, human minds would be liberated from prudery

and Renoir contributed to the cause by painting nudes

of a purity unequalled in the whole history of art.

Renoir, during the First World War, presents an enigma to us.

His two sons are both very keen to fight

and they both sign up and they're both wounded.

His wife dies of cancer over this period,

worrying about the health of their sons.

Renoir has Jean, his second son, back and talks to him about his life

and that's the origins of the great memoir.

And yet if you look at the paintings made between 1914 and 1919,

there's no sense of a world in disarray,

there's no sense of the terrible slaughters

and the losses and the end of an era.

It's quite the opposite, in fact.

It's a hymn to enduring beauty,

and maybe that is Renoir's response to the war.

What I love about this painting is the contrast

between the figure and the background.

And the background is so abstract

and he's applied the paint very thinly

in washes that are almost like watercolour, but it's oil paint.

And it's applied thinly

so that the white of the ground layer is showing through.

And then the figure is worked and re-worked

so that that paint on the figure is very smooth

whereas the background, you see lots of the texture of the canvas.

It wasn't done in one sitting.

He's working on this in the studio,

and there are many layers of paint being applied.

He's a really good technician, so there's probably time in between

for the lower layers to dry before he applies upper layers.

I think what Renoir's doing is he's intentionally leaving

that background very abstract and you see him doing this

in other late paintings as well.

It is really pretty revolutionary because, of course,

the idea of the time was to have very finished paintings.

He would paint shapes

and the interesting thing about that is when you paint shapes,

you get something much softer,

you get something that's much less fixed

and the whole process of making the painting is to gradually,

if you like, fix or define things.

So, painting a figure he might have started with a bit of raw umber...

and mixed that together...

..with his turps and linseed oil.

So, very fluid paint and it is being spread out onto the white canvas.

So something for the background...

A bit of viridian, some chrome yellow.

Also, when you think in terms of a painting developing

and there being plenty of scope for changing direction,

for softening things because they're not exactly what you want

and then redefining them -

that's a wonderfully open-minded process.

So, as these colours mix and they might be rubbed into the canvas...

they make these new, sort of, softer transitions.

So Renoir, having left this first layer to dry,

might just darken up one or two areas...

..with still relatively dilute paint.

So it's possible to just bring in this extra-strength darkness

without having to make everything defined.

And now that there is a slightly stronger area in the head,

and the background remains thin...

Well, that head stands out, the background recedes.

The next stage of Renoir's painting technique

would be to work with thicker paint.

Much more paint being mixed together, making different colours.

And so these brush marks,

these brush strokes, sit on the surface of the canvas.

Gradually, these marks are building up,

they're joining up and...

there's less and less of...

the original layer showing through.

Matisse really adored Renoir,

and when he moved to the south of France in 1917,

Renoir was also living there.

He made at least two dozen visits to Renoir,

and he would bring his own paintings and submit them for approval,

and Renoir was supportive, he liked what Matisse was doing.

Above the Matisse is a little Picasso,

which is a painting that, I think, is kind of easy to miss

in the collection because it's so small and it's hung up high,

but I think it's a fascinating little work.

It is a great example of the period

when Picasso is looking very hard at late Renoir.

At this point in his career - so this is around 1921 -

he had been living on a street in Paris that was right next

to a dealer that had a really big stock of late Renoir.

Picasso collected lots of different artists,

but the only artist that he had more of in his collection was Matisse.

So Renoir was right up there.

What I love about this painting is the fact

that he paints these gigantic bodies on this really tiny canvas.

There's something kind of claustrophobic about this work

like there is in the late Renoir.

I think that to understand any artist you have to think about

who they're looking at the time.

Even though these late Renoirs have kind of fallen out of favour,

we can't just dismiss them.

I think the late works are a monumental part

of his achievement, as important and as interesting

as every other decade.

By the time that Mr Barnes was collecting,

the late work was considered the gold standard.

Critics, writers, collectors believed

that Renoir had attained immense achievement

through these late works.

They were as great as Titian or as Veronese.

When I see large crowds of people in front of Renoirs of any period,

and there is a smile on their face and a sense of recognition

of how beautiful, how well-crafted,

how joyful the painting they are looking at is,

that to me is his great achievement and his great gift to us.

MARTHA LUCY: You'll hear the late works described as works

that reflect this lazy period in Renoir's life.

That he was just kind of not as able as he used to be,

and I think that that is absolutely not true.

Even though he suffered from very bad rheumatoid arthritis,

he would never have completed a painting and signed it

if he wasn't happy with it.

He was absolutely in control of what he was doing.

I think we need to consider the late works as the culmination

of a lifetime of work and craft and exploration.

Barnes certainly did.

And Renoir said something pretty interesting at one point,

he says, "I think I finally figured out how to paint."

MUSIC: 'Romance: 'L'Ame Evaporee' by Claude Debussy

# L'ame evaporee et souffrante

# L'ame douce, l'ame odorante

# De lis divins

# Que j'ai cueillis

# Dans le jardin de ta pensee... #

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