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 :. | The Bridge at Argenteuil in Autunn | Young Girl in a Straw Hat | Landscape with Figures at Cagnes | Little Girl in a White Apron | Young Girl with Daisies |
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Orsi, Lelio
Italian, approx. 1508-87 .Italian painter and draughtsman. A prominent Emilian artist of the mid-16th century, he was influenced by Correggio as well as by the late Mannerist style of Giulio Romano. His large-scale works seem to have been mainly secular decorations, notably illusionistic fa?ades, of which only fragments are extant. Their energy and expressiveness are apparent, however, in the surviving paintings of smaller dimensions. Orsi's sole documented architectural work is the Collegiata di S Stefano, Novellara
Ulrika Pasch
(10 July 1735 - 2 April 1796), also known as Ulla Pasch, was a Swedish painter and miniaturist. She was one of few female artists known in Scandinavia before the 19th century. She was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts (1773). Ulrika Pasch was born in an artistic family, daughter of the painter Lorens Pasch the Elder, and sister of the future painter Lorens Pasch the Younger. Her uncle, Johan Pasch, was also a painter. In the 1750s, when her brother was studying art abroad, her father's career declined severely, and Ulrika was forced to become a housekeeper in the home of her maternal aunt's widower. Her uncle however allowed her to spend a lot of time developing her artistic talent, and from 1756, she had become a professional portrait painter and was able to support her father and her sister in this way. After her father's death, she lived with her sister and set up her own studio. When her brother returned to Sweden in 1766, she had been a professional artist for ten years and her clientele had moved from the middle class to the upper classes and the aristocracy. Ulrika Pasch and her brother then worked together as professional artists, shared their studio and guided each other in their work; their collaboration was one of mutual respect and harmony, and she is known to have helped him painting the textiles and costumes, a work he found tiring. Their baby-sister Helena Sofia (1744-96) took care of their household; she is described as somewhat talented in art as well, but she spent her life as her siblings "dutiful" house-keeper, and is said to have been deeply devoted to especially Ulrika.
BOUTS, Dieric the Younger
b. ca. 1448, Leuven, d. 1491, Leuven