Pierre-Auguste Renoir
1841-1919
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 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".
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china. He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school. During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.
In 1862 he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet. Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864, recognition did not come for another ten years. 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. A fine example of Renoir's early work, and with the influence of Courbet's realism, is "Diana", 1867. In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein 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.
Renoir experienced his initial acclaim when six of his paintings hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. In the same year two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London. In 1881, he traveled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugène Delacroix, then to Madrid, Spain, to Italy. One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 "Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette". The painting depicts an open-air scene, crowded with people, at a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre.
By the mid-1880s, 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". He painted in a more severe style, in an attempt to return to classicism. This is sometimes called his "Ingres period".
In 1890 he married Aline Victorine Charigot, with whom he had had a son, Pierre. In 1907, he moved to a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean coast. Renoir had arthritis which severely limited his movement, and he was wheelchair-bound. In the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers.
After 1890, 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.
He was 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.
In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, on December 3.
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