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 :. | The Harsh and The Pearly | Near the Lake | Reclining Nude(The Baker) | Mother Anthony's Inn at Marlotte | Girls Picking Flowers in a Meadow |
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David Octavius Hill
Scottish Painter and Photographer, 1802-1870 was a founding member of the Royal Scottish Academy and its secretary for 40 years. In 1843 he enlisted the help of Robert Adamson (b. 1821, Berunside, Scot. January 1848, St. Andrews), a chemist experienced in photography, in photographing the delegates to the founding convention of the Free Church of Scotland. They used the calotype process, by which an image was developed from a paper negative. In these and other portraits they demonstrated a masterly sense of form and composition and a dramatic use of light and shade. Their five-year partnership resulted in some 3,000 photographs, including many views of Edinburgh and small fishing villages.
Jacob Claesz van Utrecht
also named by his signature Jacobus Traiectensis (born c. 1479 - dead after 1525) was a Flemish early Renaissance painter who worked in Antwerp and Lebeck. Jacob van Utrecht's life is still very much in the dark. Research on this important Flemish artist did not start before the end of 19th century. He was probably born in Utrecht, although it is not certain. It is assumed that he became a citizen of Antwerp around 1500 and he is recorded as a "free master craftsman" of the Guild of St Luke there from 1506 to 1512. From 1519 to 1525 he is recorded as a member of the Leonardsbruderschaft ("Leonard's Brotherhood"), a religious confraternity of merchants in Lebeck among whose ranks the leaders of the Protestant Reformation in the 1530s could be found. From then on no traces of his life have been found.
Jankel Adler
(July 26, 1895 ?C April 25, 1949) was a Polish painter and printmaker. He was born as the seventh of ten children in Tuszyn, a suburb of Ł??dź. In 1912 he began training as an engraver with his uncle in Belgrade. He moved in 1914 to Germany where he lived for a time with his sister in Barmen. There he studied at the college of arts and crafts with professor Gustav Wiethecher. From 1918-1919 he went back to Ł??dź, where he was joint founder of a group of avant-garde artists. In 1920 he returned briefly to Berlin; in 1921 he returned to Barmen, and in 1922 he moved to Desseldorf. There he became a teacher at the Academy of Arts, and became acquainted with Paul Klee, who influenced his work. A painting by Adler received a gold medal at the exhibition German art Desseldorf in 1928. In 1929 and 1930 he went on study trips in Mallorca and other places in Spain. During the election campaign of July 1932 he published with a group of leftist artists and intellectuals an urgent appeal against the policy of the National Socialists and for communism. As a modern artist, and especially as a Jew, he faced persecution under Hitler's regime which took power in 1933.