Few people tare pleasure in their work and fewer

Few people tare pleasure in their work and fewer admit it when they do, for work has been regarded traditionally with a solan, if not a downright jaundiced, eye. But when Pierre Auguste Renoir’s (1841-1919) master said to him in a disapproving way, "You seem to take painting as a pleasure," Renoir promptly answered, “Quite true, if painting were not a pleasure to me I should certainly not do it.”

This sensation of pleasure never left Renoir throughout his long life and is abundantly apparent in all of die more than 4,000 plantings lie produced during it. . Renoir was bom in Limoges, His father, who was a tailor," apprenticed him at fourteen to a china painter in Paris and he quick, ly found his way to the Louvre where he studied the collections. The china factory where he had been apprenticed became, bankrupt when he was seventeen, and he supported himself, first by painting fans and later by painting copies of religious pictures for a firm which sold them to missionaries.' j

Since he painted quickly and was paid by the piece, he had saved enough money to allow him to enter Gleyre’s Academy when he was twenty-two. Soon he had a studio where the young painters who founded the Impressionists often met. By 1864 he had exhibited at the official Sakm and he spent die time before the 1870 war establishing his reputation and painting both in the studio and outside. After the war he found he could bring in cash by painting portraits, a genre which he tended' to turn to over a period of many years whenever the need for money was pressing. - ■ ' ,

But by 1879 he was firmly enough established that he could marry, and in 1883 he had an exhibition of over seventy paintings at Durand Ruel, the Parisian dealers who had beatTastute enough to buy many of fie Impressionists paintings beforef the public had begun to appreciate diem.

From 1889 On he embarked on ft