Renoir [antikvár]

WHYI LOVE RENOIRby MAURICE GENEVOIXStudy for Bathers in the Forest," c. 1897. Pencil drawing on tracing paper, WU X 3S5/a in. Paris, Private collection. (Photo Robert Schmit)All my life, I do believe, I have suffered from not being a painter. Such regrets give rise to fervent admirations. So it is that, from year to year, my memory has been peopled with masterpieces, the never-forgotten gallery of pictures I might have stolen. One of the very first was surely a canvas by Auguste Renoir, Portrait of Madame Charpentier. A justly famous canvas, yet I knew nothing of thatnor would this have mattered. It was on display in the little Luxembourg Museum in Paris, which regrettably has disappeared. It was positively radiant. . . . The glow of that flesh, an inner light unquenchably welling up and radiating, what words couldever have expressed it? What investigations or technical analyses, be they the subtlest or most probing, would not in all fairness have given up on the threshold of the inexplicable, in the face of this rare and mysterious gift, this pictorial miracle?Even after what I have just written, one must still resort to words. Ever since that faraway encounter, Renoir seemed for me to stand among the great masters, those Í call the miracle-makers; and in that picture, besides an impressive facility, I found a joy and youthfulness that brought mein my own youth, in my own timewith some vital impulse into its creator's own marvelous actual-5