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 :. | After the Bath(Little Bather) | Girl with a Hoop | Portrait of Delphine Legrand | Young Girl with a Swan | William Sisley(1799-1871) |
Related Artists:
CECCO DEL CARAVAGGIO
Italian Baroque Era Painter, active ca.1610-1620 Painter active in Italy. His nationality is not known. He was a follower of Caravaggio, and his rare works reveal a highly original and idiosyncratic response to that artist's naturalism. Agostino Tassi mentioned him as involved, with several French artists, in the decoration of the Villa Lante at Bagnaia between 1613 and 1615,
jose Madrazo Y Agudo
Spanish Neoclassical Painter, 1781-1859 was a Spanish painter of the Neoclassic period. Born in Santander. Studied in Madrid with Cosme de Acuna and Gregorio Ferro, both rectors of the Academia de San Fernando at the beginning of the 19th century. Don Fernando La Serna, who was named ambassador to France at the time, brought Madrazo to Paris, where he entered the studio of Jacques-Louis David. There, under royal patronage from King Carlos IV, he executed a painting of the Death of Lucretia and other canvases on events from classic Greco-Roman history. He moved to Rome during Napoleonic times, where he was briefly jailed for failing to complete oaths of loyalty to the newly installed Napoleon II of France as King of Rome. In Rome, he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca. King Carlos IV named him pintor de camara (painter of the chamber), a position confirmed by King Ferdinand VII.
John Wollaston
English-born American Rococo Era Painter, active 1742-1775