The Met through my eyes. Renoir.

Eugène Murer. Auguste Renoir, 1877

Eugène Maurer was an enigma.

He owned a pastry shop at 93 Boulevard Voltaire and worked long hours at the oven to amass a bit of a fortune. He was something of a poet, a published novelist, a largely self-taught but minor painter, and he loved the company of unknown artists, names that would have elicited a laugh or two perhaps in their day, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, Pissarro. He would receive his friends at his pastry shop and support them as best he could. At one point, he owned 122 Impressionist paintings, many of them the masterpieces of today's collections, particularly those found on the walls of the Musée d'Orsay. The hotel he bought in Rouen towards the turn of the century would spell his financial ruin and he died broke and nearly friendless in 1906.

But much earlier, in 1877, he sat for Renoir.

I've written before, Renoir is not the artist I run to at The Met. I find his works too pretty. But this painting's honesty is urgent, with an edge, and it catches me off guard each time it catches my eye. Murer's enigmatic stare is so deep, so full, so full of the glamour of youth and almost self-indulgent, the self-indulgence of one in love with poetry and sadness that only youth has the luxury of time for, the silly sadness of the self-possessed, and utterly forgivable, the studied pose, the poseur with his aquiline features at their height and set against the beauty of nature as if to dare the blooming flowers behind him in competition. I know him, that fellow: Wasting time, luxuriantly, unaware the bloom falls off the primrose. 

This is Renoir at his best, painting his enigmatic friend with deep affection.