Renoir's world is a chocolate box, full of plump women, sweet children and pastel whirls. But even if you prefer paintings with more bite, do not dismiss Bridgestone's new Renoir exhibition. This interesting selection reveals a talent of more depth and restlessness than you may have seen before.

"Dance at Bourgival" (1883)

Many paintings are in Japan for the first time, including a surprising number from private collections. These 67 works cover the most important years of the artist's life, 1870-1890, and illustrate Renoir's transition from outsider to Old Master.

In itself, that gives us pause for thought. As one of the avant-garde Impressionists, surely Renoir would have despised the label "Old Master?" Well, yes and no.

The very first canvas, an accomplished, cold and semiclassical nude, was exhibited in the official Salon of 1870, and shows that he always had his sights on joining the establishment. However, it was another 20 years before he arrived, with an entirely different and distinctive style. Given his beginnings, it was a miracle he arrived at all.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in a poor family in Limoges, and began life as a porcelain painter. Despite poverty, he enrolled at the fine art studio of Charles Gleyre, and there befriended Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley. As we know, these young men encouraged each other to reject the old academic view of art.

The new art would thrive on reality: city streets, bourgeois pursuits and the simple life of the countryside. Add discoveries about the eye's response to color and light, and we get the fertile loam from which the Impressionists sprang.

But each seed sent out different shoots. While Pissarro stuck, cabbagelike, to his patch of rural France, concentrating on landscapes, Renoir, like a poppy, bloomed fresh every morning. As he put it, "I never know on one day what I will do the next."

The charming, formal, almost monochrome portrait of Mademoiselle Legrand, for example, strongly contrasts with his sun-dappled scene of a young woman on a swing, yet both were exhibited in the Impressionist exhibitions of the mid-1870s.

The portrait hints at his long hours in the Louvre, studying the brilliant formality of his hero Ingres, while the scene at the park, complete with the purple shadows of Impressionism, is true to the avant-garde ideal.

As one poor artist among thousands, it was sensible to display diverse talent in the hope of attracting buyers. But flitting about also laid him open to the charge of lack of application, and to some extent, it still does. However this exhibition reveals his consistent, central view of the value of art as decoration.

In early works, for example, his rich, tapestry-like textures are distinctive, warm and technically impressive. His 1873 picture of "Camille Monet Reading" depicts the young woman sunk in the rich textiles of her dress and sofa.

Renoir called himself an artisan, and together with his fear of poverty, this modesty allowed him to undertake book illustrations, portraits or decorative panels which most of his friends would have scorned.

Some extraordinary paintings are just such commissions, such as 1879's "Feast of Pan." Here, his touch is as delicate as swans down. This silken fantasy evokes the unfashionable 18th-century painters he dared to admire: Watteau and Fragonard.

He is also superb at evoking the decorative emotions of intimacy, flirtation and abandon. Look at his wonderful "Dance at Bourgival." How well he flings the couple into each other's arms, whirling over the floor scattered with matchsticks and a cast-off bunch of violets (the flower of modesty).

But then a painting of peaches strikes us, not only for the rich, velvety skins of the fruit but also for their solidity. And the scattering of apples and folded linen? It evokes Cezanne. In fact, the unlikely pair became good friends, painting together in the early 1880s. It is around this time that Renoir moves further from Impressionism and reasserts more formal values in his work.

It shows, for example, in the monumental "Nursing" of 1886, which depicts his wife Aline and their baby Pierre, and the tight composition of the timeless "Grape Pickers at Lunch."

In the final canvas, the famous "Girls at the Piano" of 1892, we witness the perfect blend of his various talents. Here are his distinctive pearly skins, silky hair, shimmering colors and harmonious atmosphere, captured in figures that glimmer between the solid now of reality and the liquid stuff of dreams.

With this painting, which was bought by the French State, Renoir had truly arrived, and his place in the history of art was assured. It was a remarkable achievement for any artist, and especially so for a poor working-class lad from Limoges.