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 :. | Young Girl Seated | Child with a Whip | Algerian Landscape:Wild Woman Ravine | Gabrielle with a Rose | Young Girl with a Rose (Mme Colonna Romano) |
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per wickenberg
1812-1846 Per Gabriel Wickenberg, född 1 oktober 1812 i Malmö, död 19 december 1846 i Pau, var en svensk konstnär. Per Wickenberg kom från enkla förhållanden, hans far var fanjunkare, men visade tidigt en talang för teckning och måleri. 1831 skedde en insamling till hans förmån i Malmö, mend vars hjälp han fick möjlighet att komma till Stockholm att studera konst. Han besvärades tidigt av en ögonsjukdom, och med hjälp av bidrag från Konstföreningen i Stockholm fick han 1836 hjälp att resa till Tyskland för att söka bot. Efter tillfrisknandet valde han att stanna en tid i Berlin och vann där ett gott erkännande för sina tavlor. 1838 reste han till Paris, och vann där samma år guldmedalj på salongen för sin tavla "Nordiskt vinterlandskap". Wickenberg blev 1839 agre och 1842 ledamot av Konstakademien, under det att han stannade kvar i Paris. Wickenbergs ögonsjukdom återkom dock, och han insjuknade även i tuberkulos. Vintern 1843-44 uppehöll han sig i Nice, för att kurera sig, men förgåves, och 1846 avled han, bara 34 år gammal. 1842 tilldelades han Vasaorden och Hederslegionens kors.
Olivier, Woldemar Friedrich
German, 1791-1859 .Painter and draughtsman, brother of Heinrich Olivier and Ferdinand Olivier. He first studied in Dessau under the court sculptor Friedemann Hunold (1773-1840), a pupil of Johann Gottfried Schadow, before teaching himself to paint. Following the return of his brothers from Paris, he toured the Harz with Ferdinand in 1810 and in 1811 moved with him, via Dresden, to Vienna. There he drew nudes and antiquities at the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste. In 1813-14 he participated in the uprising against Napoleonic occupation in the Letzow volunteer corps, along with his friends from Vienna, Theodor Kerner, Joseph von Eichendorff and Philipp Veit. After Kerner fell at Gadebusch (26 August 1813), Friedrich sketched him on his deathbed (Dessau, Anhalt Gemeldegal.).
Antonio Jacobsen
1850-1921 Danish (Resident in US) was a maritime artist born in Copenhagen, Denmark, known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels". Jacobsen painted over 6,000 portraits of sail and steam vessels, making him "the most prolific of marine artists". Many of his commissions came from sea captains, and Jacobsen was chosen both for the accuracy of his work and the low fees he commanded. Jacobsen attended the Royal Academy of Design before heading across the Atlantic Ocean. He came to the United States in 1871, and settled in West Hoboken, New Jersey (now Union City, New Jersey), across the Hudson River from Manhattan and New York Harbor, its port filled with ships from America and around the world. Jacobsen got his start painting pictures of ships on safes, and as his reputation grew, he was asked to do portraits of ships by their owners, captains and crew members, with many of his works sold for five dollars.