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 :. | Portrait of Delphine Legrand | Woman Lifting her Skirt | Ingenue | Child with Cat (Julie Manet) | Return of a Boating Party |
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Dimitri Levitzky
Ukrain portrait painter , 1735-1822
Luca Carlevarijs
Luca Carlevarijs or Carlevaris (20 January 1663 - 12 February 1730) was an Italian painter and engraver of landscapes (vedutista). Carlevarijs was born in Udine, but worked mostly in Venice. His vedute of Venice are among the earliest Baroque depictions of the city. He was influenced by the Dutch painter active in Rome, Caspar van Wittel (often called Vanvitelli). The painters Canaletto and Antonio Visentini are said to have been highly influenced by or pupils of his. Johan Richter did work with him. Also called Luca Casanobrio or Luca di Ca Zenobri, for his patronage by the latter family. He painted landscapes, sea-pieces, and perspective views. He completed over a hundred etchings of views in Venice, which give an exact representation of the principal places in that city. He died in Venice.
Edward Arthur Walton
British Painter, 1860-1922 He trained at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Desseldorf (1876-7) and Glasgow School of Art. One of the GLASGOW BOYS, he painted outdoors in the Trossachs and at Crowland, Lincs, with James Guthrie, Joseph Crawhall and George Henry. He also painted in W. Y. Macgregor's life studio in Glasgow. He joined the New English Art Club in 1887 and developed an atmospheric landscape style influenced by plein-air painting and by James McNeill Whistler with whom he was friendly during his stay in London (1894-1904); Autumn Sunshine (1884; U. Glasgow, Hunterian A.G.) is characteristic. Walton was a regular exhibitor from 1880 in both Glasgow, at the Institute of the Fine Arts, and Edinburgh, at the Royal Scottish Academy. He was elected an Associate of the Academy in 1889 and a full member in 1905, taking an active role in its affairs after moving to Edinburgh in 1904. He concentrated after c. 1885 on pastel and on watercolour, which he used notably in his Helensburgh and Kensington scenes of contemporary life. From 1915 he served as President of the Royal Scottish Water Colour Society. Oil was reserved largely for portraits in a Whistlerian style, such as the Artist's Mother.