Auguste Renoir

Describes the career of French painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, and presents and briefly discusses more than forty of his masterpieces.

This volume presents the story of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting dubbed La Loge (The Theatre Box), created in 1874. This work is one of the masterpieces of Impressionism. Its depiction of an elegant couple on display in a box at the theater epitomizes the Impressionists' interest in the spectacle of modern life. At the heart of the painting is the complex play of gazes enacted by these two figures. In turning away from the performance, Renoir focused instead upon the theater as a social stage where status and relationships were on public display. This book unites La Loge with Renoir's other treatments of the subject and with loge paintings by contemporaries, including Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. Concentrating on the early years of Impressionism during the 1870s, the book explores how these artists used the loge to capture the excitement and changing nature of fashionable Parisian society.