During the seventy-eight years of his life, Pierre -Auguste Renoir painted thousands of paintings and made uncounted drawings, watercolors, and sketches. Behind this prodigious output, rivaling even Picasso's, is a lifetime of struggle and anguish seldom hinted at in the work of this "happy painter." His efforts to find a new art to match his vision of the world created by light and warmth are vividly and intimately chronicled here through his letters and those of his friends and patrons. A comrade-in-arms of the other young artists who later became famous as the Impressionists, Renoir fought the entrenched establishment of the annual Salons, with their dead weight of academic allegories and histories. He brought contemporary Paris life in its leisure hours to his canvases, and opened up painting to a new world of art lovers. Barbara Ehrlich White, a renowned Renoir scholar, devoted more than twenty years to searching out unpublished letters and documents that reveal his...