rrectly executed. He
knows how to interpret nature in a certain sense; how to stop in time;
how to suggest by leaving a part apparently unfinished; how to indicate,
behind a figure, the sea or some landscape with just a few broad touches
which suffice to suggest it without usurping the principal part. It is
now, that Renoir paints his greatest works, the _Dejeuner des
Canotiers_, the _Bal au Moulin de la Galette_, the _Box_, the _Terrace_,
the _First Step_, the _Sleeping Woman with a Cat_, and his most
beautiful landscapes; but his nature is too capricious to be satisfied
with a single technique. There are some landscapes that are reminiscent
of Corot or of Anton Mauve; the _Woman with the broken neck_ is related
to Manet; the portrait of _Sisley_ invents pointillism fifteen years
before the pointillists; _La Pensee_, this masterpiece, evokes
Hoppner. But in everything reappears the invincible French instinct: the
_Jeune Fille au panier_ is a Greuze painted by an Impressionist; the
delightful _Jeune Fille a la promenade_ is connected with Fragonard; the
_Box_, a perfect marvel of elegance and knowledge, condenses the whole
worldliness of 1875. The portrait of _Jeanne Samary_ is an evocation of
the most beautiful portraits of the eighteenth century, a poem of white
satin and golden hair.

[Illustration: RENOIR

YOUNG GIRL PROMENADING]

Renoir's realism bears in spite of all, the imprint of the lyric spirit
and of sweetness. It has neither the nervous veracity of Manet, nor the
bitterness of Degas, who both love their epoch and find it interesting
without idealising it and who have the vision of psychologist novelists.
Before everything else he is a painter. What he sees in the _Bal au
Moulin de la Galette_, are not the stigmata of vice and impudence, the
ridiculous and the sad sides of the doubtful types of this low resort.
He sees the gaiety of Sundays, the flashes of the sun, the oddity of a
crowd carried away by the rhythm of the valses, the laughter, the
clinking of glasses, the vibrating and hot atmosphere; and he applies
to this spectacle of joyous vulgarity his gifts as a sumptuous
colourist, the arabesque of the lines, the gracefulness of his bathers,
and the happy eurythmy of his soul. The straw hats are changed into
gold, the blue jackets are sapphires, and out of a still exact realism
is born a poem of light. The _Dejeuner des Canotiers_ is a subject which
has been painted a hundred times, either for the pu