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 :. | Yvonne and Christine Lerolle Playing the Piano | Girl with Parasol (Aline Nunes) | The judgment of Paris | Woman with a Parrot(Henriette Darras) | Road by Saint-Simeon Farm |
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Agustin Esteve
Spanish, 1753-died circa 1820
Miller, Alfred Jacob
American Painter, 1810-1874 American painter. From 1831-2 he studied with the portrait painter Thomas Sully in Philadelphia, PA. In 1832 he went to France, where he studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He also visited Rome before returning to Baltimore, to open a portrait studio in 1834. Three years later Miller moved to New Orleans, LA, and was engaged by Captain William Drummond Stewart to accompany an expedition to the Rocky Mountains. The journey brought Miller into close contact with the American Indians, whose hunting and social customs he depicted in 200 watercolour sketches, and with the Far West fur trappers at their annual trading gatherings. He was one of the first artists to leave a detailed visual account of the life of the American mountain men (see WILD WEST AND FRONTIER ART). Miller's Rocky Mountain paintings are among the most romantic images of the American West ever created. His works are often panoramic and dramatic, yet he was equally adept at depicting charming, intimate scenes. His free, vigorous painting style brings to life both the American Indian and the rugged pioneer. Such paintings as the Lost Greenhorn
Carl Rottmann
German,1797-1850 was a German landscape painter and the most famous member of the Rottmann family of painters. Rottmann belonged to the circle of artists around the Ludwig I of Bavaria, who commissioned large landscape paintings exclusively from him. He is best known for mythical and heroising landscapes. The landscape painter Karl Lindemann-Frommel belonged to his school. Carl Anton Joseph Rottmann was born in Handschuhsheim (today a part of Heidelberg) on January 11, 1797. There he received his first drawing lessons from his father, Friedrich Rottmann, who taught drawing at the university in Heidelberg. In his first artistic period he painted atmospheric phenomena. In 1821 he moved to Munich, where his second period began, and in 1824 he married Friedericke, the daughter of his uncle, Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, who served as an attendant at court. This connection cleared the way for an acquaintance with King Ludwig, who in 1826-27 sponsored his travels in Italy in order to widen his repertoire, which up to that point consisted solely of domestic, German, landscapes. Upon his return he received from King Ludwig I a commission for a monumental cycle of Italian landscapes in the arcade of the Munich Hofgarten. The cycle, completed in 1833 in fresco, gave visual expression to Ludwiges alliance with Italy, and raised the genre of landscape painting to the height of history painting, the preferred mode of the Kinges other great commissions for monumental painting.