Meet Renoir

 

This morning, Meiying and I went to the National Palace Museum for the exhibition "Renoir and Painters of the Twentieth Century." The exhibition is divided into six major themes: Woman in a Hat, Flowers, Women, Pastoral and Music, Body Expression, and the South of France and the Mediterranean. I love Renoir's soft brushtouch. Under his paintbrush, almost everything is beaming with happiness. No wonder he is dubbed "The Painter of Happiness."

Most of the paintings are on loan from Pola Museum of Art in Japan. Though it was a pity that my favorite painting by Renoir "Girls at the Piano" was not on exhibit, I was intrigued by all the paintings I saw today, such as "Girl in a Lace Hat" (1891),  "Roses" (1915), "Mademoiselle Francois" (1917), "Portrain de Maire-Zelie Laporte" (1864), "La Coiffure" (1888), "Girls Picking Flowers in a Meadow" (1890), "Reading Woman" (ca. 19000, etc. Since photo-taking was not allowed, the following are some of these paintings found online.

     

                

These paintings do breeze into us serenity and joy, don't they?

To know more about the painter, after leaving the Palace Museum, we went to see the movie "Renoir," which started at 1:30pm. We saw how he suffered from severe rheumatism in his late years and his toughness in persisting in painting. There was a scene that touched me deeply, in which his second son Jean, who later became a famous film director, was at Renoir's bed looking at his frail father. Renoir told Jean, "The pain passes, but the beauty remains." "For me, there's still room for improvement. I won't stop painting until my last breath," he added. (The movie was in French.)

What a powerful and thought-provoking sentence: "The pain passes, but the beauty remains"!

 

An introduction to Pierre Auguste Renoir:

http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/renoir/