Renoir is celebrated as a "painter of happiness," but is all too often reduced to the one cliché. This is the first extensive examination of the painter's early oeuvre in the border zone between the bohemian and the bourgeois milieu in which he felt most at home. The fifteen-year period it covers was a time of great upward mobility for Renoir: having risen up from his parents' petit-bourgeois origins, he was soon at the heart of the bohemian milieu inhabited by his friends and fellow artists, and by the end of the 1870s had become a welcome guest at the salons of the haute bourgeoisie. -- Jacket.