I will begin to post short pieces of writing from books or newspapers--things I wish I'd said myself! Sometimes I'll comment on them--other times I'll just let them soak in.
Right now I'm reading LUNCHEON OF THE BOATING PARTY by Susan Vreeland.
In it, Renoir says, "To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them."
A great review of Vreeland's book can be found at http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-luncheon-of-the-boating/ where it is explained what Renoir is thinking about before this painting is done: he sees that “repeating safe easy methods portrait after portrait, as he’d been doing lately, was suffocating him.”
At the following links, you can discover the names of the people in the painting. They come alive in the book I'm reading. What fun!
http://galleries.fototagger.com/link.php?action=detailimage&id=361&sort=0
http://www.phillipscollection.org/docs/education/lbp-kit_2.pdf
