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 | Lady at Piano | Back View of a Bather | Seated Bather | Moulin Huet Bay, Guernsey |
Related Artists:
Pieter de Kempener
Pedro Campana (1503-1586) was a Flemish painter of the Renaissance period, mainly active in Italy and Spain. His actual name was Pieter de Kempeneer, translated into French as Champaigne, and was also known as Peter Van de Velde. Born in Brussels, he trained there with Bernard Van Orley. His early life appears to have been spent in Italy, where he carefully studied the paintings of Raphael, and declared himself as his pupil. In 1530 he was at work at some scene-painting, representing a triumphal arch to be erected on the occasion of the coronation of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor in Bologna, and he then left for Spain, on the advice, it is said, of Cardinal Domenico Grimani, and spent the rest of his life in that country, only returning to Brussels about 1563 or 1565. Between 1537 and 1562 he was associated with Luis de Vargas and the Italian sculptor Torregiano in establishing a school of painting in Seville, which eventually became the academy of the place; amongst the pupils educated in it was Morales. He painted for the monastery of St. Mary of Grace, Church of Santa Cruz, in the city, an altar-piece representing the Descent from the Cross (1548), which is now in the cathedral, having been removed there when the church fell into ruins. There are other works by the same painter in Seville Cathedral, especially two representing the Purification of the Virgin and the Resurrection; and the various churches of the city, S. Isidoro, S. Pedro, S. Catalina, and S. Juan, all possess paintings by this artist. One of his last works was the restoration and repainting of a chapel belonging to Hernando de Jaen, an important resident of Seville. Murillo requested that he be buried near Campana's picture, and his burial took place in the Church of Santa Cruz, close underneath the Descent from the Cross, but the whole building was burned to the ground during the Napoleonic Wars, and the tomb perished.
elisabeth vigee-lebrun
Élisabeth-Louise Vigee-Le Brun, född 16 april 1755 i Paris, död 30 mars 1842 i Louveciennes, 20 kilometer väster om Paris, var en fransk målare som i huvudsak målade porträtt. Vigee-Lebrun utförde tilldragande, idealiserande porträtt och var för en tid hovmålare hos drottning Marie Antoinette. Vigee-Lebrun var tvungen att lämna Frankrike pågrund av den franska revolutionen 1789 och efter det var hon verksam i Ryssland, Italien och Storbritannien. Efter att Napoleons kommit till makten återvände hon till Frankrike. Hon besökte Schweiz 1807 där hon i Geneve blev invald som hedersmedlem i Societe pour l'Avancement des Beaux-Arts. Vigee-Le Brun lämnade ett arv av 660 porträttmålningar och 200 landskapsmålningar. Dessa finns i privata samlingar i Europa och USA men även i stora museer som Eremitaget, National Gallery i London, Metropolitan Museum of Art i New York och National Gallery of Art i Washington, D.C..
YANEZ DE LA ALMEDINA, Fernando
Spanish Painter, active ca.1506-1526