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In paintings like Two Girls at the Piano, 1889, Renoir strove to reconstitute the charm. There could hardly be a more perfect expression of woman as domestic pet than these two blondes in their glowing red dresses, survivors from the pearly world of Fragonard that Renoir had so loved as a young man, prettily absorbed in their music making. Grace, suavity, an undemanding sweetness achieved, in his better works, through a very demanding but concealed pictorial rigor: these are the essential ingredients of Renoir's art. Though he only achieved it episodically, Renoir's ambition was to render back to painting the firm, architectural design he felt had been lost by Impressionism. Even when the gloss becomes oppressive, as in the famous portrait of a young mother and daughter called On the Terrace, 1881, one has to reflect whether the work acquires its saccharine quality by hindsight, through his countless imitators.
It may be that the sunny, optimistic expansiveness of Renoir's paintings had its defensive side; he had been a nervous youth, defiantly conscious of his role as a journeyman painter (almost, but not quite, a manual worker), and in maturity he was intensely conservative on many issues. He lived like a good bourgeois, marrying his model Aline Charigot in 1881, getting his inspiration from the modest cafes and dance halls of Paris, and later moving to Provence, where he spent his last years in a house on the Cote d'Azur, surrounded by devoted children, adoring women and faithful servants. There was never a more domesticated artist: only Renoir, perhaps, could have liked a Venus by Raphael because "you feel a good, fat, gossipy woman who is going to return to the kitchen." He detested the industrialization of France, while his contemporaries, like Monet, were finding poetry in factory smoke and railway bridges.
Anything that disturbed Arcadia was rejected, even bad weather. "Why paint snow, that leprosy of nature?" he asked.
Renoir's limits are self-evident. His portraits have no psychological depth.
His vision of "femininity" was a sentimental falsehood, for all its wide reso nance. His powers of social observation were trivial, compared to Degas or Courbet. Unlike Cezanne, he bequeathed nothing useful to later generations of painters. Even his powers of historical assimilation often failed, as in the late years, with their sluggish, phosphorescent nudes disporting themselves like antique statuary made of dough.