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 :. | Little Girl in a White Apron | Head of a Woman | Dance in the City | Girls Putting Flowers in their Hats | Julie Manet |
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Gottlieb Schick
romanticism artist. German, 1776-1812 German painter. He trained at the H?he Karlsschule in Stuttgart (1795-7) under the classically-orientated painter Philipp Friedrich von Hetsch (1758-1839), a pupil of David. Schick also took private lessons (1797-8) with the sculptor Johann Heinrich von Dannecker. From 1799 to 1802 Schick studied in Paris under David, and he soon became one of David's favourite students. He made two unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome with compositions that derived from the style of David. However, greater independence is seen in his life-size painting Eve (1800; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Mus.), a magnificent allegory of Beauty synthesizing a classically-orientated reinterpretation of ancient art and a proto-Romantic interpretation of biblical subject-matter, inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost. As Schick himself stated (letter to Dannecker, 10 July 1800), he had tried to emulate both the Medici Venus and the female figures of Raphael. In 1802, on a pension from Frederick II, Duke of Werttemburg, Schick moved to Rome and for almost a decade played a leading role in Roman artistic life. His friendship with Joseph Anton Koch led to mutual influence in the work of the two artists. Koch was indebted to Schick for invaluable hints on oil painting and for choice of subjects. For a fortnight in July 1805, Schick exhibited in the Pantheon his large oil painting The Sacrifice of Noah (2.50*3.27 m, 1804; Stuttgart, Staatsgal.). The work was inspired by Raphael's Old Testament frescoes in the Vatican Loggie; and it brought Schick enormous success. Despite financial hardship, Schick continued to work indefatigably, and without waiting for commissions, on a wide variety of projects. These included biblical and mythological subjects as well as portraits. Between 1806 and 1808 he completed his Apollo among the Shepherds (Stuttgart, Staatsgal.), a subject he had attempted while still in Paris and then again in Rome in 1805. The second Rome version had clearly gained through Schick's concentrated thought over a period of several years, and the result represented an avowal of faith both in the artist's own gifts and in German Classicism.
Niklaus Deutsch
1484-1530 Northern Renaissance German,Painter, draughtsman, designer, writer and politician. Some early designs in pen and wash
Raphaelle Peale
1774-1825 Peale was born in Philadelphia as the son and first child of Rachel and Charles Willson Peale, a famous portraitist. Lived in Philadelphia, on a home at the corner of 3rd and Lombard. Married Martha (Patty) McGlathery at the age of 20. First first professional exhibition was in 1795 at the age of 21. Artist. Born Raphaelle Peale in Annapolis, Maryland on February 17, 1774, the fifth child, though eldest surviving, of Charles Willson Peale and his first wife Rachel Brewer. As with all the Peale children, Raphael was trained by his father as an artist. Early in his career, the pair collaborated on portraits. On some commissions, Raphael painted miniatures while his brother, Rembrandt, painted full size portraits. In 1792, he made a trip to South America in order to collect specimens for the Peale's Museum. In 1797, with his brother Rembrandt, he traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, where they attempted to establish another museum. The plan fell through, however, and Raphael returned to painting miniatures. He married Martha McGlathery at about that same time, and with her had eight children. For about two years beginning in 1803, Raphael toured Virginia with the ??physiognotrace,' a profile making machine, with which he was briefly successful. In August 1808, he was hospitalized with delirium tremens, exacerbated by severe gout. By 1813, he was unable to walk without crutches. After the downturn in his health, in an era when most artists considered still life a subject worthy only of amateurs, he devoted himself almost exclusively to still life painting. It is for these works he is best known. Raphael Peale is today considered the founder of the American Still Life school. His work was on frequent exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1814 and 1818. After reportedly indulging in a night of heavy drinking, his health destroyed, Raphael died on March 3, 1825 at age 51 at his home in Philadelphia. Peale's tightly grouped still lifes are often permeated with a delicate melancholy akin to that which characterized the life of the artist; he was an alcoholic who suffered the effects of arsenic and mercury poisoning caused by his work as a taxidermist in his father's museum. His spare, essential style may have been influenced by the Spanish still lifes he studied in Mexico and by the works of Juan Sanchez Cotan, exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1818.