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 :. | Algerian Landscape:Wild Woman Ravine | Woman in a Garden-Lise Trehot(Woman with a Segull Feather) | Young Woman Seated | Spring Bouquet | Terrace in Cagnes |
Related Artists:
TINTORETTO, Jacopo
Birth Year:, 1518. Death Year:, 1594
Lorenzo di Alessandro da Sanseverino
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, active 1468-1503
Gabrie Metsu
Gabriël Metsu (January 1629 - buried 24 October 1667) was a Dutch painter of history paintings, genre works and portraits. Metsu was the son of the Flemish painter Jacques Metsu (c.1588-1629), who lived most of his days at Leiden, and Jacomijntje Garniers, his third wife, whom he married in 1625. Jacomijntje was the widow of a painter with three children of her own. Two months after Gabriël's birth, his father died. According to Jacobus Houbraken, Metsu was taught by Gerard Dou, though his early works do not lend colour to this assertion. He was influenced by painters of Leiden such as Jan Steen, and later by Frans van Mieris the Elder. Metsu was registered among the first members of the painters' corporation at Leiden; and the books of the guild also tell us that he remained a member in 1649. In Leiden, it was alleged that Metsu left a brothel at six in the morning and took a prostitute to the Academy. In 1650 he ceased to subscribe, and works bearing his name and the date of 1653 support the belief that he had moved. Metsu was trained in Utrecht by Jan Baptist Weenix and Nicolaus Knepfer. The alley on Prinsengracht In Amsterdam Metsu lived in an alley on Prinsengracht, where he kept chickens. He got into an argument with a neighbor and moved to a house on the canal side, where a daily vegetable market was held. In 1658 he married Isabella de Wolff, whose father was a potter and mother a painter. The Speed Art Museum has a portrait of the couple. Pieter de Grebber, a religious painter from Haarlem, was her uncle.