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 :. | Young Boy with a Cat | The Castle ar Dolceaqua | Reclining Semi-nude | Gabrielle with Rose | Place Clichy |
Related Artists:
Carl Gustaf Pilo
Swedish Painter, 1711-1793,Swedish painter. His father, Olof Pijhlou (1668-1753), was an artist. Pilo may have travelled to Vienna and Germany, and it is probable that he studied at the Drawing Academy established in Stockholm in 1735. From 1737 he was engaged as a portrait painter by members of the southern Swedish aristocracy (e.g. Baron Malte Ramel; evedskloster, priv. col.). About 1740 he settled in Copenhagen, where he swiftly rose to a position of importance: following the enthusiastic reception of his portrait of Louise of England, the wife of the future Frederick V (Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst, on loan to Amalienborg Castle), he was appointed court painter in 1745 and drawing-master to Crown Prince Christian (later Christian VII) in 1759. Pilo was appointed professor at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen in 1748 and for the next two decades was recognized as the foremost portrait painter in Denmark.
LINGELBACH, Johannes
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1622-1674 German painter, active in the Netherlands and Italy. By 1634 his family had settled in Amsterdam, where presumably Lingelbach trained as a painter. According to Houbraken, he visited France in 1642 and arrived in Italy two years later. However, he is not mentioned in any document of 1644, although he is recorded in Rome from 1647 to 1649. The artist left Rome in 1650 and by 1653 was back in Amsterdam, where he remained until his death. Lingelbach is perhaps the only one of the Dutch Italianates with a catalogue of numerous signed and dated works to document his artistic development. The first two signed works are The Blacksmith (1650; Rome, Melmeluzzi priv. col., see Briganti, Trezzani and Laureati, fig. 10.1) and Self-portrait with Violin (1650; Zurich, Ksthaus). Unfortunately no certain works survive from the previous years. Kren (1982) attributed a series of works depicting Roman trades, some formerly ascribed to Pieter van Laer, to Lingelbach's early career. The original group consisted of three small paintings: the Acquavita-seller, the Cake-seller and The Tobacconist (all Rome, Pal. Corsini). While these paintings have some striking points in common with the Melmeluzzi Blacksmith of 1650 and the signed Dentist on Horseback (1651; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.), it is still uncertain whether they belong to Lingelbach's pre-1650 work or are by another hand
George John Pinwell,RWS
1842-1875 English illustrator and painter. He was born in humble circumstances and was largely untrained. He was briefly a student at St Martin's Lane Art School and at Heatherley's. From 1863 he contributed woodblock illustrations to magazines, establishing his reputation in 1865 with the Dalziel brothers' editions of The Arabian Nights and The Works of Oliver Goldsmith. Pinwell's finest drawings were commissioned for the Dalziels' poetry gift-books. With another illustrator, John William North (1842-1924), he worked at Halsway Manor in Somerset in 1865, experimenting with formal effects based on the structure of stone farm buildings or on the wooden beams of barn interiors (his drawings do not seem to have survived). Some of the illustrations for A Round of Days (1866) and Wayside Posies (1867) present an ideal vision of the countryside, but a vein of social concern is also present. In The Journey's End, from Wayside Posies, a strolling player lies dead, worn out by hardship and hunger. For an illustrated edition of Jean Ingelow's Poems (1867),