Gloomy Renoir

The art of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is among the most readily recognized bodies of modern art in the world. This chapter offers new theoretical and historical perspectives upon the artist's deployment of contemporary Parisian women in the metropolitan domestic interior during the “Terrible Year.” It foregrounds a different kind of female interior than that scrutinized closely by Nina Dubin. The Terrible Year paintings by Renoir rupture the ability to imagine the domestic interior, more particularly the female domestic interior, as a realm of domestic serenity and plenitude not to mention romantic potential. Charles Rice, an architectural historian, warns against accepting the idealization of the domestic interior of the 1800s because it was a facet of the leading ideology of bourgeois domesticity. It is important to recognize the specific conditions in which the 1871 interiors were fashioned in order to grasp and interpret their extraordinary characteristics.