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 :. | Place Clichy | Young Girl with Flowers | Landscape at Beaulieu | Girl with Sheaf of Corn | Yvonne and Christine Lerolle Playing the Piano |
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George L. Seymour
British, act. 1876 - 1916 Seymour was a son of Lord Hugh Seymour (himself a son of Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford) and Anna Horatia Waldegrave (a daughter of James Waldegrave, 2nd Earl Waldegrave) and entered the Royal Navy in 1797. He captained HMS Pallas during the Battle of Basque Roads and HMS Leonidas and HMS Fortun??e during the War of 1812. For his part in the latter war, he was appointed a CB in 1815 (alongside many other Captains) and a KCH in 1831 (and later a GCH in 1834). He rose through the ranks in the navy over the years and in 1852 was appointed a KCB (and later a GCB in 1860) and finally as an Admiral of the Fleet in 1866.
LEDESMA, Blas de
Spanish painter documented 1602-1614 in Granada,Spanish painter. He is known to have worked in Granada from 1602, and in 1614 he designed a stucco vault decoration for the Alhambra. Archival sources testify to his renown as a painter of decorative fresco grotesques (untraced) and still-lifes. His activity as a still-life painter remains debatable, partly because he has been confused with Blas de Prado and also because of Torres Marten's controversial attributions. Ledesma's only unanimously accepted autograph painting is Still-life with Cherries and Flowers (Atlanta, GA, High Mus. A.), signed in Granada. A highly decorative painting, it shows none of the sophistication of still-lifes by Juan Senchez Cot?n, in Granada from 1603. It is painted meticulously and drily. Depicting a severely drawn, rather flat basket on a narrow ledge flanked by flowers behind it, the rigorously symmetrical composition is relieved only by soft lighting and the studied disarray of some fallen cherries. Two other unsigned and poorly preserved still-lifes of analogous subject-matter have been attributed to Ledesma
Louis Abrahams
1839?C1918