Manet was a painter of bourgeois life, of superficial human concerns. (Baudelaire, 23) Whatever sensibilities he possessed as a painter remained unlinked to an intellectual framework worthy of that manual skill. Unlike those tragic artists whose biographies compel the viewer’s attention and whose living conditions seem to have molded their art, Manet’s artistic activities hardly inform his work. Occasionally, sharp political news provoked the attentions of his art, but he does not appear to have taken actions that would have jeopardized his artistic or social standing. Renoir, one of Manet’s contemporaries was even a critic of Manet’s work, referring to Manet “as the standard bearer of the group, but only because his work was the first to get to the simplicity we were all out to master.” (Duchting, 15) Auguste Renoir himself came from a petit-bourgeois background. His father was poor so Auguste was forced to work from an early age. With a talent for drawing, he began an apprenticeship in porcelain painting and quickly became so good at tit hat he was soon painting figures-often nudes-and portraits onto white porcelain. Renoir, started from an early age, grew as an artist studying Watteau, Lancret and Boucher and when establishing himself as an artist after the Franco-Prussian War, Renoir had a different outlook then Manet’s bourgeois subjects; it was the ordinary people he was interested in. (Duchting, 17) Mainly because of his working class background, Renoir still obtained the naturalistic feel of the people in Paris, but from a common stand point. His paintings depicted modern Parisian life, which he made until the early eighties, are witness to the glittering side of life. They consciously avoid any hint of toil or suffering. Speaking to the painter Jean-François Raffaelli, Renoir expressed his attitude to darker social issues with perfect clarity: “There are enough unpleasant things in the world. We don’t have to paint them as well.” (House, 14) But it...