“A World Separated from the Struggles of Urban Life”: A Rare Exhibition of Renoir’s Drawings | Pierre-Auguste Renoir

HLuminous colors and sensual brushwork adorn countless mugs, stickers, tote bags as well as popular exhibits. But the commodification of Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his fellow Impressionist painters is missing something.

Renoir was an accomplished painter who produced a distinctive but largely unknown body of drawings, pastels, watercolors, and prints.

More than a hundred of these works are now on display in a new exhibition, “Renoir’s Drawings,” at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. This exhibition traces the entire stages of the artist’s life and career, and is the first exhibition in more than 100 years devoted entirely to Renoir’s works on paper.

“Because they are works on paper, they are not on permanent display in any institution,” says Colin Bailey, director of the Morgan Museum and curator of the exhibition. “Access to watercolors, pastels, red chalk, and white chalk expands your knowledge of the artist. While these will look very similar to Renoir, they will be less well known.

“Also, because we’re showing his work decade by decade, you get a real sense of how he evolved and the different stylistic moments in his career.”

Renoir was born in Limoges in southwestern France in 1841, grew up in Paris and began his career decorating porcelain. He fell under the influence of Gustave Courbet and met fellow artists such as Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley – figures who later helped define Impressionism. By 1869, Renoir was painting alongside Monet on the banks of the Seine, experimenting with a brighter color palette and a lighter touch that signaled the coming new style.

The oil paintings La Loge (Theater Box), shown at the first Impressionist group exhibition in Paris in 1874, and The Boat Luncheon Party (1880–81), became landmarks at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and the Phillips Collection in Washington, respectively.

Bailey, one of the world’s leading Renoir scholars, says: “It was a struggle at first. They all had a language that is now so beloved and familiar, but which was initially so transgressive: the high tone, the visual brushwork, even the theme of contemporary life.

“At the same time, we see in the show that, after being able to travel to Italy and back in the 1880s, he becomes less interested in Parisian social life, and more interested in female nudity, which he is undoubtedly one of the great exponents of, and this comfortable world of young women, of families, of his family, where it is a very Arcadian picture of a world separated from the struggles of urban life. This is one of the reasons why it is so attractive to the public.”

But works on paper lie at the heart of his artistic practice, influencing the paintings for which he is best known. Renoir’s drawings, presented in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris – where the exhibition will travel next year – combine early anatomical drawings, vivid glimpses of Parisian and rural life, polished pastel portraits of his circle and illustrations designed for literary works such as Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir.

“As the show developed,” Billy explains, “we were trying to represent the range of his works on paper in different media – not just pencil and crayon, but also pastels and watercolours – and then also trying to do it as a chronological survey, going from the few early academic sketches as a student to the late works, and then finally creating collages around some of the key images for which there are preparatory drawings and related drawings.”“.

At its core, the exhibition explores a pivotal moment in Renoir’s career – his renewed commitment to preparatory drawing – when he developed an extensive series of studies that laid the foundation for his ambitious, large-scale compositions. Dancing in the Country (1883) and The Great Bathers (1886-87) are displayed alongside related sketches and figure studies, providing a rare opportunity to see the drawing and preparatory materials together.

Indeed, this is the first time that the Great Swimmers painting has been exhibited in New York. A loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art is made possible by a recent change in lending restrictions.

“Until now, if you wanted to study the gestation, growth, and origins of this big, important, beautiful painting, you had to go to Philadelphia,” Bailey says. “That’s very generous of the Philadelphia Museum. But now we’re fortunate that a change in restrictions has allowed us to bring in all the large drawings about The Great Bathers, including the drawing that was given to us in 2018.”

It was The Great Bathers that proved the catalyst for the show. In 2018, when Morgan curator Drew Haynes died at the age of 103, the museum was invited to select a work from her collection. She chose Renoir’s massive red and white chalk drawing preparatory to The Great Bathers. ““Her estate was very happy for us to have this, and this stimulated the possibility of doing a comprehensive review of his work on paper,” says Bailey.

Other notable works of Renoir’s drawings include delicate pastel portraits such as Portrait of a Girl (Elisabeth Maitre) (1879), on loan from the Albertina Museum in Vienna. There are also intimate late-period studies of Renoir’s wife, Aline, and their young sons, capturing familial warmth with characteristic sensitivity.

For Bailey, who has his first exhibition as a curator since becoming director 10 years ago, a personal favorite is Renoir’s pastel portrait of his friend and fellow artist Paul Cézanne. “He has been in close contact with Cézanne from the beginning,” he says. “Renoir travels to L’Estaque to work with Cézanne. He admires him. He admires him.”

“He and [Edgar] Degas are also good friends, except at one point because Renoir sells a pastel painting that Degas gave him because he needs some money. Degas was so angry that he returned the Renoir painting to Renoir and they did not speak for two years. These artists were very close in the late 1860s and 1870s, and some remained close throughout their careers.

The exhibition concludes with the plaster sculpture The Judgment of Paris (1914), created in collaboration with sculptor Richard Guénot after arthritis severely limited Renoir’s use of his hands, forcing him to bandage them. For Billy, this is a testament to Renoir’s resilience and resourcefulness.

“Arthritis did not prevent him from painting large, ambitious nudes and landscapes, and the mastery was evident in some of these late drawings. Somehow, like Monet’s cataracts and Degas’s blindness, artists have a kind of muscle memory and can continue to create.”

“In Renoir’s case, he certainly wasn’t able to design plaster or marble but through his designs and Ginot’s guidance, he was able to create a very beautiful sculpture. We have a collection of drawings that relate to both sculpture and painting that are also part of that series. In some ways, drawing for him almost transcends media in the end. He can work in sculpture, he can work in paint, he can work in chalk and it’s the same world.”

The last comprehensive exhibition devoted to Renoir’s drawings was at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris in 1921. Bailey believes there will be a lot to learn. “Drawings help you see the seed of ideas,” he says. “They also help you see the artist at work, and because they are fragile, because they are either in museum storage or in private collections, they are not constantly visible.

“I hope this opportunity will increase people’s understanding of Renoir’s productivity and they will see what an interesting and accomplished artist he was in different media on paper, not just charcoal but also these beautiful watercolors that will surprise people because they look like Matisse and Bonnard before their time.”