Gustave GEFFROY (1855-1926). Autograph manuscript signed, Re - Lot 83

Gustave GEFFROY (1855-1926). Autograph manuscript signed, Renoir; 10pages in-8. Beautiful study of Auguste Renoir. The manuscript contains erasures and corrections. Like all the great masters, Renoir practiced all genres, with the ability to breathe life into his paintings. The Last Supper and The Night Watch are depictions of a pathetic moment, an episode from a single day, and the Las Meninas show "the extraordinary extension of the immediate atmosphere, which becomes, through the spell of painting, the distant atmosphere of the past, where the disappeared continue to breathe, to think, to live"; similarly, in Rubens' Kermesse, "it's not a curtain that rises, it's a window that suddenly opens onto the movement and clamor of the peasant round". Renoir belongs to this "pictorial intelligence [...] It is life, directly looked at, ardently admired, that is on the canvas". He has the "métier" and can paint anything. Above all, he is "the delicious painter of women". Geffroy refers to illustrations in the magazine L'Art et les Artistes, and to two portraits of little girls with the "singular physiognomy of reflective dolls". Renoir painted the girl who "is beginning to meditate, without really knowing yet what she is meditating on. Renoir has fixed a fleeting expression on her face, with its serious mouth and fixed eyes, making this vaporous portrait, with its frilly hairstyle and bodice, an infinitely rare piece. Impressionism is there, very present"... Renoir cannot be denied the title of portraitist; just look at the portrait he painted of Wagner and those of Madame Georges Charpentier, "the small pearly portrait like a pearl" and the large one with her children "in the fine French tradition of 17th- and 18th-century portraitists". Geffroy analyzes three more portraits: a woman in hair, a lady in evening dress and the actress Mademoiselle Samary. Another, "a solid young brunette woman wearing her hair under a leafy canopy, her arms large, her throat opulent [...] shows us Renoir as a painter of the flesh [......] and the bathers, the women at their toilette, and the women at rest he depicted will remain as magnificent and definitive images of the dense flesh, the full forms, the quiet animality of the woman who is alone, and whose whole body breathes, in a room among white linens, on the banks of a solitary river, or on a beach that happens to be deserted. This sense of the heaviness of forms, and also of the rosy, lively complexion of bodies, Renoir has often embellished with unexpected grace, unconscious finesse, the laughing happiness of being young"... Geffroy admires Renoir for his science of detail, and ends his talk with an evocation of Le Déjeuner, which is "a scene with three characters [...]. Lunch is over, the coffee cups are still there, along with the carafons and small glasses, the gentleman is lighting a cigarette [...] his eyes almost closed, a sort of smiling expression spread across his features". And he concludes: "Isn't the artist who was the painter of this Moulin de la Galette masterpiece, which is in the Musée du Luxembourg, definitively classified as a master of modern life and human expression?"