Men Created for Woman: Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The aged man raised himself with effort in his wheeled chair, then turned to a companion at his side and said:

"Give me a pencil, Jean."

The companion left the presence of the weary old man with bowed head, a warm imprisoned tear in his eyes, and on his lips something like a bound-up curse that he longed to loose from the depths of his heart, yet held back in fear and dread. He went out without closing the door behind him.

Silence settled over the room where the old man sat with his thick white beard and his abundant drooping mustache, weakness showing in every one of his limbs, feebleness coursing through every one of his joints. His hands had contracted so that his grip had no strength; his knees had given way so that he could no longer walk. Fearing that his growing nails would eat into the flesh of his palms, he had stuffed his fists with cotton and gauze.

He was, more than anything, like a statue of pain and weakness — except that he was alive, of flesh and blood, and of God's making, blessed be His mercy.

In the next room the companion set about searching for the pencil, but for some reason known only to God, it had lost its place and he could not find it. So he began rummaging among the heaped piles of painted papers, thrusting his head, with its combed, glossy hair, among the great colored canvases, and the smell of oil and paints rose to his nostrils; he breathed it in with eagerness and passion, as though it were perfumed young brides, or sweet, fragrant roses... And why wonder?... Is not sweet fragrance a part of "Renoir's" canvases?... Does not perfume waft from the supple bodies of his nudes?...

And there came crowding upon the man's imagination the memory of days gone by, when "Renoir" was in the full strength and freshness of his youth; when he walked on his own two feet like all his fellow men, and at the same time defied them all; when he himself carried his pencils and his papers, his colors and his canvases, moving with them from place to place in Paris and from place to place outside Paris; when he walked the streets of the city choosing his models from among the beautiful, comely girls. He still remembers how he would refuse any girl whose skin reflected the lights scattered upon it, for Renoir was passionately fond of the skin that absorbs the light, so that it neither shines in the face nor glitters. He remembers, too, his aged master in the days when he would go out into the fields, choosing from nature whatever it pleased him to paint and whose colors delighted him.

Renoir was one of those who fought against the old schools; with the "Wild Beasts" he carried the banner of absolute artistic liberation; he befriended the "Impressionists" and took a great deal from them. Yet with all this he was unique in his colors, unique in his drawings, unique in his figures and his women — and unique in his success as well, for he exhibited in the academicians' exhibitions without an obstacle confronting him all his life long.

"But where is the pencil!"

Here are papers the man tries to lift in the hope of finding the wanted pencil among them, and they bring back to his memory his master's youth, brimming with life and ambition. And there are papers that carry in their folds all that stirred his sensitive soul and his delicate feelings; and others, pictures into which he put all the love that toyed with his heart, all the passion and infatuation that played upon his mind; and others still, drawings of innocent children. And the artless girls are many, upon whom he bestowed, from his own being, every beauty and every delicacy.

And these famous nudes, these women with bodies whose like no human being had ever seen before, overflowing with life and strength, teeming with warmth and feeling, their folds full of movement and ripeness, their frames brimming with suppressed gaiety and quiet, artless delight — as though they did not know their place in man's regard, yet at the same time making you feel that place, its loftiness and its gravity... They shake your feelings to the core, so that you stand, as it were, and perhaps truly, before truth naked and bare, having cast her ornaments aside, forsaken her embellishment and her lies, stripped off her false vanity and her lying deceit; as though she did not know you stood before her, and so displays to you, unawares, her deep, pure beauty — that beauty which submits to no law or code, yet to whose will every human being and every heart submits: the beauty of the innocent flower, not of the temptress.

Yes. When you stand before "Renoir's" women you stand before "Woman" in the abstract, exalted above reality, in revolt against customs and distinctions, pure of every blemish and of every alien, base trace — or nearly pure. She is woman dominant and strong, not by her deceit and her hypocrisy, but by her truthfulness, her sincerity, and her devotion.

She is woman bearing within her folds the spirit of "Rembrandt," the strength of "Michelangelo," and the truthfulness of "Goya" — woman in every room of the house, as she appears to the child's natural eye, and to the eye of the believing, loving man.

She is Eve as God created her — in the beginning!... But was it God, one wonders, who created woman?... The companion searching for the pencil does not believe this; he holds, without hesitation or doubt, that man is the creator of woman. He offers these canvases as proof of his claim, and literary storytelling as evidence for it. Did not the master of Scheherazade create a woman? Did not Alexandre Dumas create his enchanting lady? Did not "Zola" fashion his woman "Nana" as he willed? And Gustave Flaubert? And Anatole France? And Da Vinci... and Rembrandt... and Rubens?! And this Renoir!

No... no doubt will ever cross "Jean's" mind that woman is the work of man alone!...

Renoir, at eighty years of age, waits in the next room for his pencil...

What, one wonders, will he paint? Has he not yet reached the seventh day of his creation?... Has his hour of rest not yet come?

Life had wearied him, and illness pursued him step by step until it fastened upon his feet. He entered the hospitals; no operation availed him and no surgery gave him rest.

And rheumatism began to eat at his joints one by one, down to the tips of his creating fingers, so that the brush no longer found a comfortable resting place between them.

But the creator pays no heed to pain though it surround him, for from his own self he gives without reckoning, and from his heart he brings forth his works without stinting or measure.

The companion still remembers how Renoir would stand erect before his canvases, his long, obedient brush between his fingers, giving body to his vision and realizing, from the depths of his soul, a new and captivating being, his eyes full of joy and delight, and on his lips the innocent, tranquil smile of a sage... like the smile of a child...

It is truly a wonderful thing for a man to witness the victory of spirit over matter and the defeat of cruel pain... the crushing of disease and its conquest. And there was morning... and there was evening.

And there was a new morning... the one that "Pierre-Auguste Renoir" began on the seventeenth of December in the year 1919, after a long night he had passed awake with continuous coughing and a heavy tightness in the chest.

He took his wheeled chair and steered it to the easel, where a new white canvas stood, more like a shroud than anything else — and he turned to the one who attended him at his side and said:

"Give me a pencil, 'Jean'!"

The companion went out to look for the pencil... and when he returned, "Pierre-Auguste Renoir" had given up the ghost, before his shroud — the one he had loved all his life.

Beirut, April 15, 1947