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| Detail from Luncheon of the Boating Party |
Aline Charigot had grown up in Essoyes, near Burgundy.
Renoir admired her skill. “She had hands that could do things,” he told his
son. She is to be seen in a number of Renoir’s pictures. Jean Renoir writes,
“From the moment he took up a brush to paint, perhaps even earlier … Renoir was
painting the portrait of Aline Charigot.” Since Renoir’s time, his son asserts,
the world has seen an influx of little round, plump beings with beautiful red
cheeks.
Aline wanted to have children, which didn’t exactly fit in
with the requirements of a man who had devoted himself to painting. Due to
fears that he could not support her, and the travel he was doing for his work,
they did not marry until 1890. But in the end Renoir decided life without Aline
would not be complete. “She gave me the time to think,” Renoir told his son.
“She kept an atmosphere of activity around me, exactly suited to my needs and
concerns.”
In the early years in Paris, the Renoirs gave little dinners for their artist friends serving bouillabaisse or chicken saute with mushrooms; if money was scarce, pot-au-feu. No matter how hard times were, Aline always managed to
receive her husband’s friends. Her cooking was quick, uncomplicated, definite
and orderly. “She fitted in well with Renoir’s rule of making plenty out of
little. ‘Use only the best, but frugally.’”
“By confining her activities to what she knew best, she won
the admiration and respect of all who met her.” Jean Renoir writes that one
evening at the opening of an exhibition, Degas noticed the simple little dress
Aline was wearing and said to Renoir: “Your wife looks like a queen surrounded
by mountbanks.”
Aline did not spoil her children. “It’s much easier to let
them have their way, but it makes life harder for them later on,” she said.
When Jean Renoir was growing up, the Renoirs took a house in Essoyes for the
summer holidays, a wine-growing region with vaulted cellars hewn out of rock
where the Renoirs would get pitchers of wine. Aline’s talent for management was
very important as the household grew larger and she herself became less active.
When the Renoir’s last house in Cagnes was purchased, she remained a “peasant
to her fingertips,” he son writes, tending olive and orange trees, planting
vegetable gardens and vineyards.
Because it was so important to him, Aline organized the
household around Renoir’s work. In looking at it so long, she grew to love and
understand his painting. He thought that “profound, dramatic or passionate
concerns set the seal of the transient on face and body, whereas … art is
concerned only with the eternal.” Renoir was “always discovering and
rediscovering the world at every instant of his existence, with every breath of
fresh air he drew. Whether he painted the same girl or the same bunch of grapes
a hundred times, each occasion was a marvelous revelation to him.” Jean Renoir
writes: “In his world mind is liberated from matter, not by ignoring it but by
penetrating it. The blossom of the linden-tree and the bee sipping the honey
from it follow the same rhythm as the blood circulating under the skin of the
young girl sitting on the grass … The world is one.”
Though we don’t get to live quite like French peasants, Don
and I certainly have their tastes. And
we do, as best exemplified by the Renoirs, prefer the real to the romantic.
Aline Renoir’s emotional intelligence matched Renoir’s commitment to his work
and nurtured in her children an equal love of the real world. Her son Jean
Renoir is among the world’s great filmmakers, having made The Rules of the
Game and The Grand Illusion in the 1930’s. And then he wrote Renoir,
My Father! Aline Renoir exemplifies for me the art of living well.
