Reviews

Gr 2-4-Another easy-to-read biography of a famous artist. Full-color reproductions of 16 of Renoir's paintings appear throughout, including A Girl with a Watering Can, along with 9 works by his contemporaries. There are also five of Venezia's characteristic cartoons of speculative events from the artist's life (hiding under the queen's train to illustrate his childhood games in the courtyard of the Louvre, or greeting the public after his painting style became popular). Especially useful is the way the author shows Renoir's art in relation to the French Salon and to the other Impressionists. Paintings of the same scene by Renoir and Claude Monet are reproduced on facing pages, and do more to describe the Impressionist style than many paragraphs of text. The color reproduction is good; the typeface large and readable. There is no bibliography or index. More accessible to younger students than Rosabianca Skira-Venturi's A Weekend with Renoir (Rizzoli, 1991), Venezia's title is a useful series entry.-Pam Gosner, formerly at Maplewood Memorial Library, NJ