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 with a Parasol and a Small Child on a Sunlit Hillside | Young Girl with a Rose (Mme Colonna Romano) | Greenhouse | The Painter Jules Le Coeur walking his Dogs in the Forest of Fontainebleau | Stephane Mallarme |
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Carl Wilhelmson
1866-1928 Swedish painter and lithographer. Wilhelmson trained first as a commercial lithographer in Göteborg. In 1886 he enrolled as a student of decorative painting at Valand College of Art where his teacher was Carl (Olof) Larsson. In 1888, having obtained a travel grant, he went to Leipzig to study lithographic technique. From 1890 to 1896 he lived in Paris, where he worked as a lithographer and commercial artist and studied at the Academie Julian. Wilhelmson's preferred subject-matter was the coastal landscape of Bohuslen and the people of its little fishing villages with their huddles of wooden houses. There is no trace of ethnography in his depictions of local life; they are full of serious realism and display a sensitive insight into the perilous life of the fishermen, with which he had been familiar since childhood. In the Village Shop
Friedrich Stahl
German, 1863-1940
Arnold Genthe
German-born American Photographer, 1869-1942,German-born American photographer who received a doctorate in philology and linguistics from Jena University in 1894. As a photographer he was self-taught, and is probably best known for his pictures of Chinatown in San Francisco (1896-1906), where he opened a portrait studio in 1897, two years after arriving in America. Although his studio and equipment were destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, his prints survived and the Chinatown photographs were published in 1908. In that year he also started making autochromes. Genthe travelled widely in South America, Japan, and Germany, photographing landscapes and architecture, and in 1910 exhibited at the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo organized by Alfred Stieglitz. Relocating to New York in 1911, he flourished as a celebrity portraitist. He also became celebrated for his dance photographs, published in The Book of Dance (1916) and Impressions of Isadora Duncan (1929). His autobiography,