His third manner has surprised and deceived certain admirers of his.  It seems to mix his two first techniques, combining the painting with the palette knife and the painting in touches of divided tones.  He searches for certain accords and contrasts almost analogous to the musical dissonances.  He realises incredible “false impressions.”  He seems to take as themes oriental carpets:  he abandons realism and style and conceives symphonies.  He pleases himself in assembling those tones which one is generally afraid of using:  Turkish pink, lemon, crushed strawberry and viridian.  Sometimes he amuses himself with amassing faded colours which would be disheartening with others, but out of which he can extract a harmony.  Sometimes he plays with the crudest colours.  One feels disturbed, charmed, disconcerted, as one would before an Indian shawl, a barbaric piece of pottery or a Persian miniature, and one refrains from forcing into the limits of a definition this exceptional virtuoso whose passionate love of colour overcomes every difficulty.  It is in this most recent part of his evolution, that Renoir appears the most capricious and the most poetical of all the painters of his generation.  The flowers find themselves treated in various techniques according to their own character:  the gladioles and roses in pasty paint, the poor flowers of the field are defined by a cross-hatching of little touches.  Influenced by the purple shadow of the large flower-decked hats, the heads of young girls are painted on coarse canvas, sketched in broad strokes, with the hair in one colour only.  Some little study appears like wool, some other has the air of agate, or is marbled and veined according to his inexplicable whim.  We have here an incessant confusion of methods, a complete emancipation of the virtuoso who listens only to his fancy.  Now and then the harmonies are false and the drawing incorrect, but these weaknesses do at least no harm to the values, the character and the general movement of the work, which are rather accentuated by them.

[Illustration:  RENOIR

YOUNG WOMAN IN EMPIRE COSTUME]

Surely, it would be false to exclude ideologist painting which has produced wonders, and not less iniquitous to reproach Impressionism with not having taken any interest in it!  One has to avoid the kind of criticism which consists in reproaching one movement with not having had the qualities of the others whilst maintaining its own, and we have abandoned the idea of Beauty divided into a certain number of clauses and programmes, towards the sum total of which the efforts of the eclectic candidates are directed.  M. Renoir is probably the most representative figure of a movement where he seems to have united all the qualities of his friends.  To criticise him means to criticise Impressionism itself.  Having spent half of its strength in proving to its adversaries that they were wrong, and the other half in inventing technical methods, it is not surprising to find that