Chapter One: Renoir Calls CHAPTER ONE RENOIR CALLS Between the bare horse-chestnut trees in the early spring of 1881 on the Avenue Montaigne, a wide, graceful street that leads southwest from the Champs-Élysées all the way to the Seine, steps a bearded figure in black, a large bag on his arm. He weaves past horse-drawn carriages on their way to the Bois de Boulogne, their harnesses wet from rain and glinting in the sun; carts, walkers with hats, canes, and the preoccupations of business; nannies with skittish children and yapping dogs. Too haphazard for a doctor, neither well-heeled nor quite upright enough for a social caller, he knocks on a grand door. Inside the golden town house, a classical revival "petit hôtel"1 at no. 66, with its piano nobile, leafy frieze and pilasters, four urns atop the roof balustrade, a salon-as-studio awaits him: a thick, dark red woven Smyrna carpet, a fringed and tasseled profusion of draperies and gilded furniture that look part Second Empire, part seraglio. Pierre-Auguste Renoir sets up his easel: the square palette fits neatly into the corner of his paintbox; he squeezes his miniature mountains of color, ground by hand by his dealer on Rue Pigalle, until they overlap and cover the wood beneath. A forest of brushes; a picnic of rags, linseed, and a glassful of turpentine at his side. A smooth coat of silver white dries on the canvas, adding luminosity to whatever is painted on top of it.

He begins to mix color on canvas, painting pink or blue strokes with, in his brother Edmond''s words, "anxious rapidity," each one the "zig-zag flight of a swallow": "Pensive, dreamy, a far-away look in his eyes, you''ve seen him run across the boulevard twenty times; forgetful, disorganized, he''ll come back ten times for the same thing without remembering to do it; always running on the street, always motionless indoors;. if you want to see his face light up. [and hear him] hum some gay refrain. try to catch him while he''s working."2 Louis and Louise''s first family house, 66 Avenue Montaigne, Paris, where their three daughters were painted by Renoir A call, a brush of silk, an ushering, a scramble: two small girls in lace scamper in. His eye takes in two sisters dressed in bright white, now holding hands, one in a pink satin sash, the other blue, a duet of sugar-almond-colored sweetness. In the picture we will see his love of eighteenth-century art, the peachy softness, the rococo bloom of Fragonard, Boucher, and Watteau. He will paint their spirit, the freshness of skin with good circulation, the literal picture of health, with their rosy color, their fair hair.

There is nervous energy in the room. His brother says that, like a child, he experiences "eager curiosity and constant astonishment." Louis and Louise Cahen d''Anvers have commissioned this portrait of their two younger daughters. Perhaps, as was later said, the idea for this painting came from the widow Madame Mina Ephrussi, whom the girls adored. Mme. Ephrussi lives in a newly built house on Rue de Monceau, the area developed by the Pereire brothers,I with her sons, Ignace and Charles; the latter a bachelor art historian and collector who will become director of Paris''s leading art review, the Gazette des Beaux-Arts ; an "exquisite man,"3 Alice told a journalist later in life. It is he, the scion of grain traders and bankers from Odessa, who first suggested to their mother that his friend Renoir should paint her children. And so, a year earlier, Renoir had painted the elder sister, Irène, with her ripples of red hair and faraway eyes.

That picture, known as Little Irène , or "the girl with the blue ribbon," led to the second commission. Little Irène was submitted to the Salon of 1881. "An interesting portrait of a child by M Renoir," recorded the Gazette des Beaux-Arts , accompanied by a sketch of the picture (titled Portrait of a Child ) done for the publication, at Charles Ephrussi''s request, by Renoir himself.4 Renoir had been hoping for two more separate commissions for the younger sisters, not one. That might have been double the money, which would have been welcome, because Renoir, on the cusp of forty, was newly installed in an apartment in Montmartre, in the north of Paris. If the eighth arrondissement of Avenue Montaigne is high finance and high society--that part of the fashionable world known as the "gratin" (the browned cheese on top with the crunch and the flavor) or the Faubourg (after the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the most resplendent part of Paris)--Rue Houdon in the eighteenth arrondissement is quite different: a "bizarre land" that is the "home of every kind of artist,"5 a still part-rural hill outside the city, with windmills, vineyards, lush gardens, music, and raucous entertainment (the world''s first cabaret, Le Chat Noir, will open there in November). Renoir has become part of Manet''s Impressionist gang. Each Thursday or Sunday they meet at 5:30 p.

m. in a café such as La Nouvelle-Athènes on Place Pigalle, with its globular lights shining through the smoke over marble tables. With Cézanne, Sisley, Degas, Pissarro, the critic Edmond Maître, the photographer Nadar, and Émile Zola the novelist, they have all become friends, brothers-in-art, so many of whom will redefine the rubric of painting through loose brushwork, color, light, and ambience. Renoir has had some success, but not enough. In the middle of a period of intense productivity, he is accepting commission after commission, painting rich patrons and their families. Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children (1878),II a picture Proust describes as rivaling "Titian at his best," has been a hit at the annual art show, the Salon, in 1879. Proust wrote: "Will not posterity, when it looks at our time, find the poetry of an elegant home and beautifully dressed women in the drawing room of the publisher Charpentier as painted by Renoir, rather than in the portraits of the Princesse de Sagan or the Comtesse de la Rochefoucauld by Cot or Chaplin?"6 The peacocks of JaponismeIII on the wall cast an avian eye on the publisher''s wife, Marguerite Charpentier, in the venue of her literary salon frequented by Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and the diarist Edmond de Goncourt; with her two curly-haired, soft-cheeked, blue-silk-clad children: Paul, three--locks uncut, not yet in breeches--and Georgette, six, sitting on Porthos, the family''s Newfoundland dog. Mme.

Charpentier wears a black silk gown with lace and white tulle at the neck and bodice by the foremost couturier of the day, the House of Worth. After the Salon, she hangs the painting on the wall of her town house, where everybody sees it. The picture of Alice and Elisabeth, which requires many sittings, will emerge as a dazzlingly affectionate portrait of a radiant, transient childhood moment. "The little girls'' muslin dresses that look like dancers'' tutus,"7 notes Proust''s narrator of a work of his fictional Impressionist Elstir (who owes something to Renoir, as well as to Whistler, Monet, and Helleu). Renoir''s feelings about the parents are less warm. His is a world of bohemians--dancers, rebels, actresses, taverns, rogues in boaters--and he is ill at ease among the crystal and silver, the patina, the millefeuille of money on the Avenue Montaigne. His paternal grandfather, François, had been left as a nameless baby on the steps of Limoges Cathedral in 1773, and adopted by the Renouard family, who gave him their name, later mistranscribed as Renoir. François''s son Léonard became a tailor and married a seamstress, Marguerite Merlet.

Pierre-Auguste was Léonard and Marguerite''s middle child, and trained as a porcelain painter, once attempting to decorate Sèvres china faster than machinery to stem the tide of industrial revolution that threatened his livelihood. His porcelain past shows in the lucid colors, in the china-doll face of the younger sister, Alice, which resembles the "Bébé," or "Triste" model of the Jumeau doll brand, the obsession of junior Paris in the 1880s. In Renoir''s painting, the girls are porcelain dolls with spirit. What is a portrait? An exercise in likeness, a work of art, a study of character, a thing of beauty, a statement of identity? Renoir''s precarious existence depends on pleasing his patrons, who might refuse to pay him if they do not like his work, which must not only be beautiful but, as he complains, a perfect resemblance to their loving, subjective, parental eye. Renoir is on his way to becoming a fashionable portraitist, but for now his artistic freedom is still restricted by his patrons'' desires. As the new medium of photography commands the same price as his paintings, he needs to please. But beauty comes naturally to him. "A picture has to be pleasant, delightful and pretty--yes pretty.

There are enough unpleasant things in the world without us producing more," he once said.8 Like the infantas of Velázquez or Van Dyck''s children of Charles I, this painting shimmers with both innocence and privilege. It will become known as Pink and Blue because Alice, four, is illuminated by the pink glow of her silk slip, sash, socks, and hair ribbon; blue-sashed Elisabeth, six, seems more defiant. Alice is bored of posing; her only compensation is that she is wearing a new dress of point d''Irlande , hand-sewn Irish crochet lace.9 As a breadline-dwelling Catholic of working-class origin, Renoir is almost as different from those who have commissioned him as it is possible to be within Paris. His pictures encapsulate the nature of the city, in which new money and new art, bohemians and bankers are a magnet for each other, and runaways, romantics, and dreamers jostle alongside financiers and women of fashion. The Cahen d''Anvers paterfamilias, Lo.