A Note on the Renoirs, Père et Fils

Young Pierre-Auguste studied the work of Jean-Antoine Watteau at the Louvre, and they share an uncomplicated love of pleasure, of beautiful women,
and of parties, which in Watteau, who was a sick man, can have a melancholy feel.
As Walter Pater puts it, “He was always a seeker after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all.” Renoir too paints parties in the countryside.
“No Marx, no Freud,” says Kenneth Clark, “just a group of ordinary human beings enjoying themselves.” Here’s a Renoir girl enjoying herself.
Jean Renoir the filmmaker, like the Rococo master, also gives us dress picnics in the woods.
And in The Rules of the Game, an extended party, he takes the role of Octave, the wistful outsider, in love with the pleasures of these people, and with the lady of the house, but himself a funny-looking guy, not one of them, a fool—
—like Watteau’s Gilles. 

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox, and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.


In Praise of Older Women


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