Pierre-Auguste Renoir was never my favourite Impressionist. I studied him in a cursory way as a teenager for the same reason I studied the post-Impressionists and late Turner: for the release they constituted from the glossy, overripe representational quality of Renaissance art. The teenage soul in Bombay (without quite knowing it was doing so) rejoiced at no longer having to gaze at nudes that purportedly looked like real, flawless nude women, at Venuses and Davids that closely resembled, right down to the tendon, the real Venus and David, at dead pheasants that glowed like actual dead pheasants in a gentleman’s kitchen. “Human kind cannot bear very much reality,” said T.S. Eliot; and he might well have been speaking of a certain revulsion against the Renaissance.

Part of my antipathy must have come from what I saw as my cultural inheritance. Whatever was ‘Indian’ in me couldn’t recognize the pheasants and reclining nudes. This didn’t prevent me from participating, intimately, in Van Gogh’s fields and cafés and studios, in Cézanne’s hillsides, in the elements that combined to produce Turner’s mysterious steam-engine. Like the cities of the world from the end of the 19th century onwards — London, Paris, Berlin, Calcutta, Cairo — the new painting was a place of frenetic cultural intermingling which we could all, in various identities and guises, inhabit.

With Renoir, Europe still seemed very distant. An Indian contemporary of Monet’s or Alfred Sisley’s might have encountered, in Bengal, some of the very things they did: a semi-industrial sunset, where context and disintegration are at once concealed and implied; an elusive vantage point glimpsed at the end of a canal in the middle of a city. Sisley’s and Monet’s pictures contain a new awareness of the momentary and mysterious in the midst of the everyday that’s also in evidence, a couple of decades later, in Tagore’s songs and in the works of the poets and artists who follow him. But that Indian would have probably seen the sort of people gathered at the Moulin de la Galette in Renoir’s famous picture of a café only within a colonial setting.

The crowd in the café and on the square almost provoke, unfairly, the question you might legitimately ask yourself when you watch the film, Notting Hill: ‘Where are the immigrants?’ You don’t ask this of the Sisley painting because the intercultural contact that’s characteristic of modernity’s abandon — bringing together styles from the Parisian street, Bali, Japan, Africa and India — has already begun to animate its technique. You turn to Renoir’s café — especially because it’s a café scene — expecting that abandon and play. But you are disappointed. The painting has none of the provisionality, the air of estrangement and migrancy of, for instance, Van Gogh’s cafés and rooms. Instead, it’s a painstaking, penetrating study of a frozen society, demarcated and fixed by class, a bourgeoisie that, even while drinking and dancing outdoors, is unaware of anything but itself, and apparently unconscious of the conflicted world of imperial France it thrives in.

“All great civilisations have been based on loitering,” said Renoir’s son, Jean, the filmmaker — in relation, as it happens, to his first experience of India. But it could also be a statement about Paris, and a certain response to Paris, of which Impressionism, post-Impressionism, the writings of Walter Benjamin, and some of Renoir’s own films are cardinal examples. But it would be wrong to look in Pierre-Auguste’s paintings for the flânerie and the casual sense of discovery you find in his son’s work, or in the works of his own contemporaries, or in Frenchmen of a later generation, like Jacques Tati. This came home to me when I saw, for the first time, the original of La Loge at the Courtauld (picture, top) — with the painting described above, Bal au moulin de la Galette, Renoir’s most powerful meditation on the French bourgeoisie. Unlike Sisley, Monet, Cézanne, or Gauguin, Renoir isn’t concerned with the outdoors, or the street, or the aura of migrancy and unfamiliarity that’s inherent in everyday locations in the modern world: he’s fascinated by interiority — not the interiority of individuals, but of a class.

It’s a class intent upon studying, admiring, and spying upon itself from various angles, and, in doing so, in keeping at bay or denying the momentous change that surrounds, defines, and will superannuate it. The theatre box is a sort of fragile social cocoon; the shared glance, even if it has a private, erotic charge, confirms the artificially inviolate and self- regarding nature of this world. No ‘elsewhere’ penetrates it; the man has trained his binoculars on others in the audience, while the woman tentatively acknowledges a stranger who’s already part of the microcosm.

When you view the original, you notice the light in the box, which makes Renoir’s picture comparable to, say, a contemporary photograph of a couple watching television: it’s an artificial glow in which a class shelters itself. Benjamin, referring to the rise of the novel, said that, by the 19th century, the public no longer wanted mythic or sacred subjects; it wanted to read about itself. The same could be said of theatre at the time La Loge was painted (1874), with Ibsen’s gradual pre-eminence. But the figures, as has been pointed out before, are not looking at the stage. They — as the painter knows — constitute the pulse and tissue of theatre itself. In this way, Renoir inaugurates a line taken up by his son — not in the short films full of idiosyncrasy and wonder, but in La Règle du Jeu (still, bottom), the incisive dissection of the French bourgeoisie’s relentless fashioning, and preservation, of its own universe.