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 | Rose et Bleue | Young Girl with a Rose (Mme Colonna Romano) | The Bridge at Argenteuil in Autunn | Young Woman Seated |
Related Artists:
GUARIENTO d Arpo
Italian painter (active 1338-1368 in Padua)
Jan Frans van Dael
an excellent painter of fruit and flowers, was born at Antwerp in 1764, but went early to Paris and settled there. He was self-inatructed in art, but made such progress that he soon distinguished himself at the exhibitions, on one occasion obtaining the prize of 4000 francs, and on two others, the large gold medal. His style is in the manner of Van Huysum and Van Spaendonck, although he did not confine himself strictly to fruit and flowers, but painted other subjects, in which such objects might with propriety be introduced. Two of his pictures, which he painted for the Empress Josephine, represent 'An Offering to Flora,' and 'The Tomb of Julia'; the latter is now in the Louvre. His master-piece, known as 'La Croisee,' the fruit of three years' labour, was likewise purchased by the Empress Josephine, and is now in a private collection at Liege. He was also patronized by the Empress Marie Louise, who took one of his pictures with her to Parma. He died in Paris in 1840, and was buried in the cemetery of Pere Lachaise by the side of his friend Van Spaendonck. The Louvre has also by him three pictures of 'Flowers' and one of 'Fruit.'
School of Fontainebleau
ca 1550