It was summer 1874 at Claude Monet’s house in Argenteuil on the Seine just outside Paris. Édouard Manet arrived from his house at Gennevilliers, on the opposite bank, and began painting Monet’s wife and infant son in the garden. Auguste Renoir turned up and started to paint the same scene alongside Manet. The little masterpiece he created is in the forthcoming exhibition Renoir and Love at the National Gallery.
In 1924, Monet recalled that day half a century earlier:
Manet, seduced by the colour and the light, decided to paint a picture en plein air of people under the trees… Renoir arrived… He asked me for my palette, a brush and a canvas, and there he was, painting away beside Manet. The latter watched him out of the corner of his eye, from time to time looking at the canvas. Then he made a face, passed discreetly by me, and whispered in my ear about Renoir: ‘He has no talent, that boy! Since you are his friend, tell him to give up painting!’
He churned out canvases and could knock off a portrait in 45 minutes
Ouch! This was an uncomfortable joke at best (Monet drily remarked to his interviewer: ‘C’est drôle, hein, de la part de Manet?’). Manet, while charming, could be extremely touchy. Renoir advanced his own art by picking up the manner and approach of his contemporaries, and Manet must have found it irritating that day, because Renoir’s handling was so obviously indebted to his. And Manet may well have been more thin-skinned than usual because his own painting, ‘The Monet Family’ (1874; Metropolitan Museum, New York), was new for him as an exercise en plein air – a practice that he had sneered at in the past but to which Monet and Renoir were devoted.
