French Impressionist Painter, 1841-1919 Pierre-Auguste Renoir (February 25, 1841?CDecember 3, 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau". Renoir's paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color, most often focusing on people in intimate and candid compositions. The female nude was one of his primary subjects. In characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested the details of a scene through freely brushed touches of color, so that his figures softly fuse with one another and their surroundings. His initial paintings show the influence of the colorism of Eugene Delacroix and the luminosity of Camille Corot. He also admired the realism of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, and his early work resembles theirs in his use of black as a color. As well, Renoir admired Edgar Degas' sense of movement. Another painter Renoir greatly admired was the 18th century master François Boucher. A fine example of Renoir's early work, and evidence of the influence of Courbet's realism, is Diana, 1867. Ostensibly a mythological subject, the painting is a naturalistic studio work, the figure carefully observed, solidly modeled, and superimposed upon a contrived landscape. If the work is still a 'student' piece, already Renoir's heightened personal response to female sensuality is present. The model was Lise Tr??hot, then the artist's mistress and inspiration for a number of paintings. In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air (in the open air), he and his friend Claude Monet discovered that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet, working side-by-side, depicted the same scenes (La Grenouill??re, 1869). One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette). The painting depicts an open-air scene, crowded with people, at a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre, close to where he lived. On the Terrace, oil on canvas, 1881, Art Institute of ChicagoThe works of his early maturity were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling colour and light. By the mid 1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women, such as The Bathers, which was created during 1884-87. It was a trip to Italy in 1881, when he saw works by Raphael and other Renaissance masters, that convinced him that he was on the wrong path, and for the next several years he painted in a more severe style, in an attempt to return to classicism. This is sometimes called his "Ingres period", as he concentrated on his drawing and emphasized the outlines of figures. After 1890, however, he changed direction again, returning to the use of thinly brushed color which dissolved outlines as in his earlier work. From this period onward he concentrated especially on monumental nudes and domestic scenes, fine examples of which are Girls at the Piano, 1892, and Grandes Baigneuses, 1918-19. The latter painting is the most typical and successful of Renoir's late, abundantly fleshed nudes. A prolific artist, he made several thousand paintings. The warm sensuality of Renoir's style made his paintings some of the most well-known and frequently-reproduced works in the history of art..  Related Paintings of Pierre Renoir :. | Madame Renoirand Bob | Madame Henriette Henriot | Algerian Woman | By the Seashore | Bathers |
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Barna da Siena
Italian Painter, active ca.1350 Barna da Siena, also known as Barna di Siena, was a Sienese painter active from about 1330 to 1350, and was the painter in Siena during this period. He learned his trade from Simone Martini. Barna is believed to have paint the frescoes depicting the life of Jesus in the Collegiata di San Gimignano and is generally credited with Christ Bearing the Cross, with a Dominican Friar in the Frick Collection in New York City. He was killed in a fall from the scaffolding. Barna's figures are more dramatic and vigorous than any in previous Sienese painting.
Ralph Albert Blakelock
(October 15, 1847 - August 9, 1919) was a romanticist painter from the United States. Ralph Blakelock was born in New York City on October 15, 1847. In 1864, Blakelock entered the Free Academy of the City of New York (now known as the City College) with aspirations of becoming a physician. After his third term he opted to dismiss his formal education and left college. From 1869-71 he traveled west, extensively wandering far from known civilization and spending time among the American Indians. Largely self-taught as an artist, he began producing competent landscapes, depicting select views from his travels, as well as scenes of American Indian life. His works were exhibited in the National Academy of Design. Moonlight, 1885, the Brooklyn MuseumIn 1877 Blakelock married Cora Rebecca Bailey; they had nine children. In art, Blakelock was a genius, yet, in business dealings and in monetary transactions he proved a failure. He found it difficult, if not crushing to maintain and support his wife and children. In desperation he found himself selling his paintings for extremely low prices, far beneath their known worth. In hopes of lifting his family from abject poverty, reportedly on the day his 9th child was born, Blakelock had offered a painting to a collector for $1000. The collector made a counter offer and after refusing the proposed sum Blakelock found himself in a bitter argument with his wife. After the domestic dispute, Blakelock returned to the patron and sold the painting for a much lesser sum. Defeated and frustrated, it is said he broke down and tore the cash into pieces. And so it was after such repeated failed business transactions that he began to suffer from extreme depression and eventually show symptoms of mental frailty. In 1899 he suffered a breakdown.
Henry Lejeune
(12 December 1819 - 5 October 1904) was an English painter of landscapes, genre, literary and biblical scenes. He became well-known for his genre paintings of children. Henry Le Jeune was born in London, the son of Anthony Le Jeune, a professional musician of Flemish origin, and the third of five children. After showing an early interest in art he was encouraged by his family to study the art collections in the British Museum. In 1834 Le Jeune was admitted to the Royal Academy where, after winning 4 silver medals in succession, he won a gold medal in 1841 for the biblical painting "Samson Bursting his Bonds". He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840 with a work entitled "Joseph Interpreting the Dream of Pharaoh's Chief Butler". From 1845-48 he taught at the Government School of design at Somerset House, and from 1848-64 was curator and instructor at the Royal Academy. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) in 1863 and an honorary retired associate in 1886. Le Jeune married Dorothy Lewis (1815-1864) on 21 June 1844 and had five sons and three daughters. He lived in London all his life, dying in Hampstead in 1904.