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 :. | Grand Canal, Venice | Woman with a Cat | Young Girl with Flowers | Lady at Piano | Woman Lifting her Skirt |
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POUSSIN, Nicolas
French Baroque Era Painter, 1594-1665 French painter and draughtsman, active in Italy. His supreme achievement as a painter lies in his unrivalled but hard-won capacity to subordinate dramatic narrative and the expression of extreme states of human passions to the formal harmony of designs based on the beauty and precision of abstract forms. The development of his art towards this end was focused on the search for a point of equilibrium and synthesis between the forces of the Classical and the Baroque around which most critical debate in Rome was concentrated during the 1630s. Poussin did not aspire to the classicism of Raphael's idealized human forms or Michelangelo's re-embodiment of the physical splendours of the antique world, nor did he attempt to vie with the bravura and energy of Annibale Carracci's treatment of Classical mythology in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Equally he was not concerned with the illusionistic effects and heightened emotionalism of Baroque artists such as Pietro da Cortona and Lanfranco. He was concerned above all with interpreting his subject-matter, whether Classical or religious, and telling a story with the greatest possible concentration of emotional response,
PALMA GIOVANE
Italian Mannerist Painter, ca.1548-1628 Son of Antonio Palma. A greater artist than his father, his vast oeuvre represents the impact of central Italian Mannerism but principally of Jacopo Tintoretto on Venetian painting in the generation after Titian, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese. He died in his late seventies and was occasionally referred to as 'il vecchio', but since the 17th century he has been known as 'il giovane' to distinguish him from his great uncle. He was virtually self-taught, apart from a presumed acquaintance with his father's workshop. In 1567 he came to the attention of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, Duke of Urbino, who was to support him for four years. A possible knowledge of Federico Barocci's art at the court of Urbino left little trace on his surviving early works. The Duke sent him to Rome for study, where he spent a few months apprenticed to an unknown artist. There his sympathy was with Taddeo Zuccaro and Federico Zuccaro, who influenced the graphic style of the drawing of Matteo da Lecce (1568; New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib.), his first dated work. His Roman sojourn, which lasted until c. 1573-4, made a direct impact on some of his Venetian works and indirectly made him receptive to Tintoretto's style. A tendency in Rome in the 1560s to retreat from the most artificial and decorative aspects of Mannerism in favour of naturalism was also to affect Palma's attitude to style in his mature works
Maurice Utrillo
French Painter, 1883-1955,French painter, son of SUZANNE VALADON. He was entrusted to his grandmother while his mother posed as a model for such painters as Renoir and Puvis de Chavannes before discovering her own talent for drawing and painting. His father, the Spanish painter Miguel Utrillo (1862-1934), only admitted paternity eight years after Maurice's birth. Maurice Utrillo had no predisposition for art, but when he was 19 his mother took medical advice and urged him to adopt drawing and painting as a distraction from his need for alcohol. In search of a suitable subject, he went to the countryside around Montmagny, a village to the north of Paris, where, between the autumn of 1903 and the winter of 1904, he completed almost 150 paintings, sombre, heavily impasted landscapes, such as the Roofs of Montmagny (Paris, Pompidou). By 1906 the doctor felt that Utrillo could return to Montmartre. His pictures of the streets and suburbs were painted with a less heavy impasto and with lighter tones.