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 :. | Dancing Girl with Tambourine | Nude in an Armchair | Grand Canal, Venice | Woman with a Parrot(Henriette Darras) | View at Dolce Acqua with the Borgho Antico the bridge over the Nervia and the Doria Castle Postcard |
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Carl Tragardh
(20 September 1861 - 5 June 1899) was a Swedish painter. Trägårdh studied at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts in Stockholm 1881-1883, in Karlsruhe 1883-84, and Munich until 1885. He then moved to France where he became a resident until his death. He exhibited both in Sweden and in France. He received a couple of medals and found a patron in the French singer and art collector Jean-Baptiste Faure (1830 - 1914) who bought some 40 paintings by him. His production is often landscape with grazing cattle, usually cows or sheep.
Philip Reinagle
1802-1835 British Philip Reinagle Gallery Philip Reinagle entered the schools of the Royal Academy in 1769, and afterwards became a pupil of Allan Ramsay (1713-1784), whom he assisted in the numerous portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. He exhibited first at the Royal Academy in 1773, sending portraits almost exclusively until 1785, when the monotonous work of producing replicas of royal portraits appears to have given him a distaste for portraiture, and to have led him to abandon it for animal painting. He became very successful in his treatment of sporting dogs, especially spaniels, of birds, and of dead game. In 1787, however, he sent to the academy a 'View taken from Brackendale Hill, Norfolk,' and from that time his exhibited works were chiefly landscapes. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1787, but did not become an academician until 1812, when he presented as his diploma picture 'An Eagle and a Vulture disputing with a Hyaena'. He likewise exhibited frequently at the British Institution. Reinagle was also an accomplished copyist of the Dutch masters, and his reproductions of the cattle-pieces and landscapes of Paul Potter, Ruysdael, Hobbema, Berchem, Wouwerman, Adnaan van de Velde, Karel Dujardin, and others have often been passed off as originals. He also made some of the drawings for Robert John Thornton's New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus, 1799-1807, and for his Philosophy of Botany, 1809-10 ; but his best drawings for book illustration were those of dogs for William Taplin's Sportsman's Cabinet, 1803, which were admirably engraved by John Scott.[1] Reinagle died at 5 York Place, Chelsea, London, on 27 Nov. 1833, aged 84. A drawing by him, 'Fox-hunting the Death', is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Reinagle's daughter Frances Arabella was married to John Levett-Yeats, grandson of the English merchant and planter Francis Levett. His son, Ramsey Richard Reingate, was also an artist, and followed his father's style.
Jules Guerin
Mural painter and Illustrator. American 1866-1946 American muralist, painter and illustrator. Guerin was born in St Louis, Missouri on November 18, 1866 and moved to Chicago to study art in 1880. Later he was to follow a parade of other American artists and architects of his day to Paris, where he studied with Benjamin-Constant and Jean Paul Laurens. Returning to America after his European sojourn, he began his career as an artist illustrating books, often travel books about exotic places. It is likely that these designs are based on his own travels through North Africa and Palestine. The designs that he did then as well as his ability to romantically depict exotic peoples and places stood him well later when he began painting murals. His mural work typically featured large areas of gold with vermilion, salmon and rose hues and blue and green accents. As with many of the artists of his time Guerin took an active part in the international expositions of his day, showing at the Paris Expo 1900, where he received an honorable mention, the Pan American Expo in Buffalo, New York, 1901, the Louisiana Purchase Expo held in St Louis in 1904 at which he won a silver medal, and the Lewis & Clark Expo in Portland, Oregon in 1905. In 1915, Guerin was asked to serve as color co-ordinator of the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 in San Francisco. It is likely that connections that he made there led to his one man show at the University of California, Berkeley two years later, followed by several large murals in the Federal reserve Bank in San Francisco. Daniel Burnham, one of Chicago's most influential architects, and his colleague Edward H. Bennett were commissioned to create the Chicago Plan in 1907, a major milestone in the international City Beautiful movement. In pursuit of this effort, Burnham invited Guerin paint a series of renderings of Burnham and Bennett's proposed cityscape to complement the numerous maps and plans that gave more technical information. The majority of these original renderings--by Guerin and other artists--are in the collection of the Department of Architecture at The Art Institute of Chicago, while others are currently owned by the Chicago Historical Society. In 1903, he travelled to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and painted "Pittsburgh as Hell with the Lid Off" for Lincoln Steffens, a renouned Muckraker. Lincoln Steffens mentions this in his autobiography. In 1912, when architect Henry Bacon began working on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., he hired Guerin to create renderings of his proposed designs. After he received the commission, Bacon retained Guerin to paint the two large murals, Reunion and Emancipation, that decorate the interior of the memorial, allegorical figures that today serve primarily as the backdrop to Daniel Chester Frenches Seated Lincoln statue.