Episode Details

In the spring of 1871, revolutionaries during the Paris Commune nearly drowned a thirty-year-old painter sketching by the Seine, until their leader recognized him as the man who had once hidden him. That painter was Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and this episode follows his working-class survival story from a tailor's family in Limoges to the walls of the Louvre.

We cover the singing talent Charles Gounod wanted to train, the porcelain factory job that ended when a mechanical stamping process replaced his brush in 1858, the hustle of painting fans and religious hangings, the founding of Impressionism with Monet and Sisley, the pragmatic retreat to the Salon and the Charpentier portrait that made him Paris's most sought-after portraitist, a 35-minute portrait of Richard Wagner, the crisis in Italy that made him declare he could not draw, his marriage to Aline Charigot, and the rheumatoid arthritis that deformed his hands yet never stopped him working.

• Why the 1858 stamping machine was the AI of its day and how technological displacement pushed Renoir into fine art
• The economics of the Paris Salon and why an artist with no safety net had to compromise to eat
• The Ingres period of razor-sharp outlines that alienated critics and clients before his final synthesis of structure and color
• Busting the myth of brushes strapped to his hands: what the bandages really were, and the rolling-canvas crank he invented
• Sculpting through Richard Guino's hands, being carried into the Louvre in 1919, and the thefts that still target his work