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 :. | Place Clichy | Oarsmen at Chatou | Young Woman Seated | The Lesson | Portrait of Jeanne Samary |
Related Artists:
Lionel Walden
(1861-1933) was born in Norwich, Connecticut in 1861. He first became interested in art in Minnesota, where the family moved when his father became rector of an Episcopal Church there. As a young man, Walden moved to Paris where he studied painting with Carolus-Duran. In around 1893-97, Walden was in England, living in Falmouth. Paintings of Cardiff in Wales are in museums in Cardiff and Paris. Walden received medals from the Paris Salon and was made a Knight of the French Legion of Honor. He visited to Hawaii in 1911 and several times thereafter. Walden died in Chantilly, France in 1933. According to David H. Forbes, author of Encounters with Paradise: Views of Hawaii and its People, 1778-1941, Lionel Walden "was the finest seascape painter to work in Hawaii". The Brooklyn Museum, the Henry Art Gallery (University of Washington, Seattle), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Isaacs Art Center (Waimea, Hawaii), and the Musee d'Orsay are among the public collections holding works by Lionel Walden.
SCHALCKEN, Godfried
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1643-1706 Dutch painter and etcher, active also in England. He was the second son of Cornelis Schalcken from Heusden, a clergyman in Made, and Aletta Lydius, who came from a famous clerical family in Dordrecht. In 1654 the family moved to Dordrecht, where Cornelis was appointed headmaster of the Latin school. There Godfried was apprenticed to Samuel van Hoogstraten. He completed his training in Leiden with Gerrit Dou and by 1665 had returned to Dordrecht. Schalcken's earliest known works, for example the Doctor's Visit (1669; Germany, priv. col., on loan to Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Mus.), are dominated by the influence of Dou and the Leiden 'fine painters'. Like Dou, Schalcken painted small genre pieces with a wealth of painstakingly rendered detail, and his themes and frequent use of artificial lighting are strongly reminiscent of the Leiden master. The six prints known by him, including a portrait of Gerrit Dou and a few portraits after van Hoogstraten, must also originate from this period. Possibly under the influence of Caspar Netscher and Frans van Mieris, Schalcken soon afterwards adopted a freer touch with gentler transitions and a lighter palette and applied himself to painting genre pieces with elegant figures.
Aelbrecht Bouts
( 1450s, Leuven - March 1549, Leuven) was a Netherlandish painter. His first name is sometimes spelled eAlberte, eAelberte or eAlbrechte. He was born into a family of painters. Aelbrechtes father was Dieric Bouts the Elder (ca.1415-1475), and his brother was Dieric Bouts the Younger (ca.1448-1490). Jan Bouts (ca.1478-ca. 1530), son of Dieric Bouts the Younger, also became a painter. Dieric Bouts the Younger inherited his fatheres shop in 1475, while Aelbrecht established his own workshop, also in Leuven. Whereas Dieric the Younger continued in his father's style, Aelbrecht developed his own unmistakable style with strong colors, rich texture and fine details. Bob Jones University Museum and Gallery (Greenville, South Carolina), the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge), Harvard University Art Museums, The Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Hood Museum of Art (Hanover, New Hampshire), the Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena, California), the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, the Czartoryski Museum and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart are among the public collections having paintings by Aelbrecht Bouts.