A Common or Garden Artist Biography

 

Here's the thing about artist biographies. There are good ones and bad ones. Isaacson's Da Vinci irritated me so I didn't realise that it was actually a good one. A very good one.

That's the thing about contrasts; you need to read an unsatisfying one to realise that actually, what you condemned before was really pretty good. It was far from a simple recounting of what he did day to day. It attempted to delve into his mind. I'm glad I read Vasari's biography of Leo first, for an alternative point of view.

So I got this Renoir biography and started reading it because the cover blurbs looked promising.

I don't know what I was expecting. I am fascinated by the Impressionists the way I am obsessed by the Bloomsbury crowd.

I learned through reading this book that the moniker Impressionist was actually an insult for artists who didn't follow the classic style and merely daubed their canvases with visible brush strokes. Renoir, at any rate, became famous when he adopted a more classical style. Raphael and the art of Pompeii were inspirations.

I guess the really interesting and inspirational bits in this book was the triumph of the human spirit bits. How he kept working with little or no acclaim (or money) and then just as he becomes successful (after 2 decades of hard work) he is debilitated by rheumatoid arthritis but continues to work, through his pain and disability, leaving more than 700 canvases when he died.

He had an illegitimate daughter whom he kept a secret from his family. His relationship with his wife Aline deteriorated (and it is clear that the author of this biography didn't like Aline) especially towards the end of her life (though considerably younger, she died first of untreated diabetes, mostly because of the stress brought about by the Great War where her two sons were seriously injured).

The book is very well researched but there were many times I felt she could have done more to describe the times he lived in and given us a little context for what was happening so we could understand Renoir's reactions. Actually she did do this once when talking about the Dreyfus Affair but not nearly enough.

I think she wasted too much space on the most mundane of notes that could have been spent providing some context.

I forced myself to finish it because I had bought it and started it but nowhere did it rivet or entrance me.

I guess that comes of reading too many good books just before. Which I will get around to writing about.

Eventually.