on his shaggy hide. The mother is in
black, a mellow reception robe, tulle and lace. White and blue are the
contrasting tones of the girls--the blue is tender. A chair is at the
side of a lacquer table, upon which are flowers. Renoir flowers, dewy,
blushing. You exclaim: "How charming!" It is normal French painting,
not the painting of the schools with their false ideal of pseudo-Greek
beauty, but the intimate, clear, refined, and logical style of a man
who does not possess the genius of Manet, Degas, or Monet, but is
nevertheless an artist of copiousness, charm, and originality. Charm;
yes, that is the word. There is a voluptuous magnetism in his colour
that draws you to him whether you approve of his capricious designs or
not. The museum paid $18,480 for the Charpentier portrait, and in
1877, after an exposition in the rue Le Peletier, sixteen of his
paintings, many of them masterpieces, netted the mortifying sum of
2,005 francs.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born at Limoges, February 25, 1840. His
father was a poor tailor with five children who went to Paris hoping
to better his condition. At the age of twelve the boy was painting on
porcelain--his father had picked up some rudiments of the art at
Limoges. Auguste did so well, displayed such energy and taste, that he
soon fell to decorating blinds, and saved, in the course of four
years, enough money to enable him to enter the atelier of Gleyre.
There he met Sisley, Bazille--afterward shot in the Franco-Prussian
war--and Claude Monet. They became friends and later allies in the
conflict with the Parisian picture public. Renoir made his first
offering to the Salon in 1863. It was refused. It was a romantic
bit--a nude lady reclining on a bed listening to the plucked music of
a guitar. It seems that the guitarist, and not the lady, was the cause
of offence. It is a convention that a thousand living beings may look
at an undressed female in a picture, but no painted man may be allowed
to occupy with her the same apartment. In 1864 Renoir tried
again--after all, the Salon, like our own academy, is a
market-place--and was admitted. He sent in an Esmeralda dancing. Both
these canvases were destroyed by the painter when he began to use his
eyes. In 1868 his Lise betrayed direct observation of nature,
influenced by Courbet. Until 1873 he sent pictures to the Salon; that
year he was shut out with considerable unanimity, for his offering
happened to be an Algerian subject, a Par