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 :. | Richard Wagner January 15 | Two Girls | Leontine and Coco | Girl and Watering Can | Study for Nude in the Sunlight |
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Lucas Cranach
1472-1553 German Lucas Cranach Locations Lucas Cranach the Elder was born at Kronach, Franconia. He was apparently trained by his father, Hans, a painter, and from 1495 to 1498 undertook work at Kronach for Coburg and Gotha. There is evidence that Cranach resided in Vienna between about 1500 and 1504. In 1504 he married Barbara Brengbier of Gotha; they had three daughters and two sons, Hans (died 1537) and Lucas the Younger (1515-1586), both of whom were painters. In 1505 Cranach established residence at Wittenberg, where he was court painter to three successive electors: Frederick the Wise, John the Constant, and John Frederick the Magnanimous. Cranach was a prosperous and respected citizen. He owned several houses and land, held the office of councilor, and was a burgomaster. He also worked for other princely patrons and was a follower and lifelong friend of Martin Luther. In 1550 Cranach followed John Frederick the Magnanimous to Augsburg, where the elector was in exile, and in 1552 accompanied him to Weimar. Cranach died in Weimar on Oct. 16, 1553.
John Ruskin
English Romantic Writer and Painter, 1819-1900 English art critic. Born into a wealthy family, Ruskin was largely educated at home. He was a gifted painter, but the best of his talent went into his writing. His multivolume Modern Painters (1843 C 60), planned as a defense of painter J.M.W. Turner, expanded to become a general survey of art. In Turner he saw "truth to nature" in landscape painting, and he went on to find the same truthfulness in Gothic architecture. His other writings include The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851 C 53). He was also a defender of the Pre-Raphaelites. In 1869 he was elected Oxford's first Slade professor of fine art; he resigned in 1879 after James McNeill Whistler won a libel suit against him.
Durrie George Henry
American Painter b.1820 d.1863 Durrie and his older brother John (1818-98) studied sporadically from 1839 to 1841 with the portrait painter Nathaniel Jocelyn. From 1840 to 1842 he was an itinerant painter in Connecticut and New Jersey, finally settling permanently in New Haven. He produced c. 300 paintings, of which the earliest were portraits (e.g. Self-portrait, 1839; Shelburne, VT, Mus.); by the early 1850s he had begun to paint the rural genre scenes and winter landscapes of New England that are considered his finest achievement. His landscapes, for example A Christmas Party (1852; Tulsa, OK, Gilcrease Inst. Amer. Hist. & A.), are characterized by the use of pale though cheerful colours and by the repeated use of certain motifs: an isolated farmhouse, a road placed diagonally leading the eye into the composition, and a hill (usually the West or East Rocks, New Haven) in the distance. By the late 1850s Durrie's reputation had started to grow, and he was exhibiting at prestigious institutions, such as the National Academy of Design. In 1861 the firm of Currier & Ives helped popularize his work by publishing prints of two of his winter landscapes, New England Winter Scene (1858; Mr and Mrs Peter Frelinghuysen Carleton priv. col.) and the Farmyard in Winter.