He broke my heart so I busted his arm
I’ve done some damage to my right shoulder and, pending a visit to a doctor, envision myself in some sort of cast and unable to type with my right hand. Could I manage with my left? Then I found this line in the basic, one-size-fits-all, self-replicating online biography of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919): “In 1880 Renoir broke his right arm and for some time painted with his left hand.”
For me it raises two questions: How did he break his arm, and what did his southpaw paintings look like?
It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1880 paintings, even with one website that’s still under construction being quite off-handed (pardon the pun) about jumbling the dates of his works. Then I discovered that the self-replicating biography itself had the wrong year for his skeleton-rearranging accident — it was in 1897.
There was a lesson to be learned here, but I like to make the same mistakes twice, just to be sure I wasn’t right the first time.
It didn’t take long to assemble a bunch of images of Renoir’s 1897 paintings, and put the ones from 1880 back in the museums when no one was looking. The broken-arm paintings, displayed throughout this post (shown here is “Young Woman in Profile”), are fine, nothing bizarro or skewed about them that I can see, nothing you can spot and say, “Oh, that’s so gauche!” (get it?). But more on that later.
How did he break his arm? I kept searching and found the “official” reason: He fell off his bicycle. See the rest.
