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 :. | Mixed Flowers in an Earthenware Pot | Ingenue | The Promenade | Nymph by a Stream | Suzanne Valadon |
Related Artists:
Ernfried Wahlqvist
painted Landscape with a church by a river in 1863
Lyon, Corneille de
Dutch practicing in France, approx. 1500-1575 Dutch painter, active in France. It is uncertain whether he was apprenticed in his native city of The Hague or in Antwerp, and nothing is known of him before 1533, when he was recorded in Lyon. It was possibly in the same year, while the French court was resident in Lyon, that Corneille was made painter to Queen Eleanor, the second wife of Francis I. In 1541 Corneille was painter to the Dauphin (later Henry II), and when the new king succeeded to the throne (1547) and made his state entry into Lyon in 1548, Corneille became Peintre du Roi. Corneille had obtained his naturalization papers in December 1547 and retained French nationality for the rest of his life. He married Marguerite Fradin, the daughter of a Lyon printer of some importance, and this allowed him to enter Lyon society. His studio was extremely prosperous until c. 1565, the year he is known to have visited Antwerp, but disappeared completely after his death despite the fact that he founded a dynasty of painters. His sons Corneille de La Haye II (b 1543) and Jacques de La Haye and his daughter Cl?mence de La Haye were all painters, and the family continued to be known for its artists until the 18th century. Corneille de Lyon was a Protestant, like all those in the circles in which he moved, and it may be that the decline of his fortunes in the 1560s was precipitated by the reversion of Lyon to the Catholic faction
Robert Nanteuil
1623-78 French engraver, draughtsman and pastellist. He was the son of Lancelot Nanteuil, a wool merchant, and submitted his thesis in philosophy, for which he engraved the headpiece, at the Jesuit College of Reims, in 1645. He went on to work in the studio of Nicolas Regnesson, whose sister he married in 1646, before moving to Paris in 1647. His early work mainly consisted of portrait drawings in black lead on parchment (e.g. Paris, Louvre), and he continued to draw throughout his career. He took 155 of his 221 portraits directly from life. His drawing style was influenced by Philippe de Champaigne, and he based his engraving technique on the work of Claude Mellan and Jean Morin. By 1652 he had developed his own technique