I am still suffering. . . . I am not content and I am scraping off, still scraping off. . . . I am like children in school. . . . I am still in the blotting stageand I'm forty.
When Renoir wrote those words (in 1882) his deft blottings pleased his impressionist friends but not himself. Like Monet, Sisley and Pissarro, Renoir had learned to see nature as a dazzling cobweb of colored light, where the shapes of things melt and blend like mist. But at 40 the spare, scraggle-bearded painter grew suddenly sick of mistiness, went digging for solid forms....
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