II.

Early Life and Work

Renoir was born in Montmartre, Paris. His first ambition was to be a cavalry officer, to avoid becoming an artist like his father. He transferred to the Flying Corps after coming close to death from war wounds in 1915. Though he won the Croix de Guerre, World War I left him with one idea—not to be in the army.

Early in 1920, shortly after the death of his father, Renoir married Andrée Heuschling, model for several of his father’s last great paintings, including Les Grandes Baigneuses (1918). Their son, Alain, was born in 1921. In 1924, inspired in part by repeated viewings of Foolish Wives (1921), directed by Erich von Stroheim, Renoir started to make films. These were financed by the sale of paintings left him by his father, and starred his wife, who took Catherine Hessling as her screen name. Though, for many, Nana (1926), a big-budget adaptation of the novel by Émile Zola, is one of his greatest films, it failed commercially, and Renoir soon found it necessary to earn a living from film-making.