It would be difficult to imagine a “safer” exhibition for a group of major museums to undertake than the retrospective of Renoir’s work which has recently arrived at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston after major showings in London and Paris.[1] Attendance figures can only be underestimated, so the financial rewards—and the benefits to public education—can be taken for granted. Of course, this would be true for a major show of any late nineteenth-century French master, but for a variety of reasons it is especiallytrue for Renoir, who holds a unique place of honor in the hearts of the lightly cultured public all over the westernized world. No other artist seems to make the looking at painting so effortlessly delightful and so unobstructed by the difficult aesthetic barriers normally raised by high art. As a maker of crowd-pleasing aesthetic confections, Renoir stands out today even when compared to the most popular composers of the late-romantic era—Tchaikovsky, Puccini, Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss. Like them, he seems to have felt almost perfectly the sentimental pulse of the upper-middle-class “everyman” of a particular historical period, a pulse which he personalized with complex technical instincts and a consistent sense of the degree of narcissism and self-indulgence necessary to excite his late-century audience to ecstasies of self-satisfaction. It is Renoir’s good fortune that the everyman of his contemporary audience has not changed very noticeably, in his character or values, over the last ninety years. His nostalgia for a past more