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 :. | Woman in Black | Madam Charpentier Children | Box at the Theatre | Claude Monet (mk06) | In the Meadow |
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Sarah Miriam Peale
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 19, 1800 - February 4, 1885, Philadelphia) was an American portrait painter, one of the notable family of artists descended from the miniaturist and still-life painter James Peale, who was her father. She is noted as a portrait painter, mainly of politicians and military figures. Lafayette sat for her four times. Sarah was James Peale's youngest daughter and was trained by her father, and uncle Charles Willson Peale. She served as a studio assistant to her father. Her first public works date from 1816 with subjects such as flowers and still-life but soon turned to portraiture, In 1818, she spent three months with Rembrandt Peale, her cousin, in Baltimore, and again in 1820 and 1822. He influenced her painting style and subject matter. For 25 years, she painted in Baltimore (1822-47) and, intermittently, in Washington, D.C. She was accepted to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1824 along with her sister Anna Claypoole Peale, the first women to achieve this distinction. Over 100 commissioned portrait paintings are known from her time in Baltimore and she was the most prolific artist in the city during that era. Her subjects were wealthy Baltimore residents and politicians from Washington DC.
BORGIANNI, Orazio
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1578-1616 Orazio Borgianni (c. 1575 - buried 15 January 1616) was an Italian painter and etcher of the Mannerist and early-baroque periods. He was the stepbrother of the sculptor and architect Giulio Lasso. Borgianni was born in Rome, where he was documented in February 1604. He was instructed in the art of painting by his brother, Giulio Borgiani, called Scalzo. The patronage by Philip II of Spain induced him to visit that Spain, where he signed an inventory in January 1605. He returned to Rome from Spain after April 1605 at the height of his career, and most of the work of his maturity was carried out 1605-16. In Spain, he signed a petition to begin an Italianate academy of painting and executed a series of nine paintings for the Convento de Portacoeli, Valladolid, where they remain. From his time in Spain, there remain two of his paintings in the Prado Museum: St Christopher and the Stigmatization of St Francis. On his return to Rome he was patronized by the Spanish ambassador, for whom he painted several pictures, and he was also employed in painting for the churches. He painted as late as 1630. after which he returned to Spain. He frescoed in the apse of the church of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome, a Martyrdom of S.Stefano I and a Messengers of Constantine call on Saint Silvestro (1610). His canvas of San Carlo Borromeo in the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (1612) is an eclectic and emotive synthesis of both Carracci and tenebrist styles. The influence of Caravaggio is also evident in a painting of the same saint (1616) now in the Hermitage Museum. A lively self-portrait of an earnest, somewhat foppish Borgianni is in the Rome Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica.
Adam Colonia
Dutch , Rotterdam 1634-1685 London