All language subtitles for ITV Great Art Series 4 5of5 Renoir 1080p_ENG_Subtitles01

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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