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 :. | White Pierrot | Madame Victor Chocquet | Grand Canal, Venice | Woman with a Parasol and a Small Child on a Sunlit Hillside | Pont Neuf, Paris |
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Fernando Yanez
Spanish 1489-1536 Fernando Yanez Gallery
Frida Kahlo
1907-54 Mexican painter, b. Coyoacen. As a result of an accident at age 15, Kahlo turned her attention from a medical career to painting. Drawing on her personal experiences, her works are often shocking in their stark portrayal of pain and the harsh lives of women. Fifty-five of her 143 paintings are self-portraits incorporating a personal symbolism complete with graphic anatomical references. She was also influenced by indigenous Mexican culture, aspects of which she portrayed in bright colors, with a mixture of realism and symbolism. Her paintings attracted the attention of the artist Diego Rivera, whom she later married. Although Kahlo's work is sometimes classified as surrealist and she did exhibit several times with European surrealists, she herself disputed the label. Her preoccupation with female themes and the figurative candor with which she expressed them made her something of a feminist cult figure in the last decades of the 20th cent.
George Dawe
1781-1829 British George Dawe Locations English painter and writer. He was the son of the mezzotint engraver Philip Dawe who taught him engraving. He continued to concentrate on engraving when he entered the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 1796, producing portraits until 1802, when he turned to history painting. In 1803 he won a gold medal and the following year made his d?but at the Royal Academy, where he exhibited until 1818, often showing such anecdotal and literary works as Imogen Found in the Cave of Belarius (exh. RA 1809; London, Tate). He was elected an ARA in 1809 and an RA in 1814 and soon afterwards returned to portrait painting. In 1816 he painted a number of portraits of George IV daughter Princess Charlotte (e.g. London, N.P.G.), several of which were engraved. In 1817 he went to Brussels and was present at the review of the allied troops by Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington in Cambrai. Soon afterwards he was invited by Tsar Alexander I of Russia to paint the portraits of all the senior officers who had taken part in the Napoleonic Wars. He travelled to St Petersburg in 1819 where, over the next nine years, he painted nearly 400 portraits. These were placed in a specially built gallery (destr.) in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. He returned briefly to England in 1828 before travelling to Berlin, where he painted the portraits of Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1828; London, N.P.G.) and Frederick William III, King of Prussia (1828; untraced). From Berlin he moved to St Petersburg and then to Warsaw before being forced by illness to return to England, where he died shortly afterwards. His book The Life of George Morland with Remarks on his Works (1807) is both a lively account of his godfather dissipated lifestyle and a fairly critical appreciation of his work.