A Favorite Painting 32

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Oarsmen at Chatou 1879

Has there ever been a father-son pair of artists, working in different media, who matched the brilliance of Pierre-Auguste and his son Jean? Back in the 1970s, the University of Buffalo had a retrospective of the younger Renoir's films from the 1930s, and so I got the chance to see most of his work from that decade on the big screen. It was one of the experiences that contributed to my cinephilia (such as it is), as it first introduced me to the glories of movies made somewhere other than Hollywood. It was only later that I discovered the work of the elder Renoir, and by then it was impossible for me not to see the qualities that bound them together across the generations and moving from canvas to screen. There's a common spirit, a basic humanity to their work that suggests the influence of one on the other, or maybe something deep within their shared DNA. It's evident in the painting above, which reminds me of one of the first films by Jean that I saw way back during that retrospective, Une Partie de Campagne from 1936. In a way, it's easy to imagine the film as spinning off from the painting (though in fact it is based on a Guy de Maupassant short story). The clip I've embedded below lacks subtitles, but give it a look anyway-- you'll see the same sense of composition and expression of what I guess is meant by the phrase joie de vivre, that are evident in the work of Pierre-Auguste.



By the way, the full film is available on YouTube (with subtitles). Part one can be found here.