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 :. | Reclining Semi-nude | Rocky Crags at L'Estaque | Algerian Woman Seated | Portrait of the Artist's Mother | Bather Seated on a Rock |
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Hans Eworth
Flemish Northern Renaissance Painter, active 1540-1573 Flemish painter, active in England. Jan Euworts was listed in 1540 as a freeman of the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp, but by 1545 he had moved to England, where until 1571 his name, spelt in a wide variety of ways (e.g. Eeworts, Eottes, Euertz, Evance, Eworts, Ewotes, Ewout, Ewoutsz., Eywooddes, Hawarde, Heward, Huett etc), appeared in numerous naturalization, tax and parish documents. About 35 paintings are generally attributed to him, consisting primarily of dated portraits of the English gentry and nobility. The majority are signed with the monogram HE, which led to their being attributed to the Flemish painter Lucas de Heere during the 18th and 19th centuries. Cust reattributed the paintings to Eworth on the basis of an inventory (1590) of the collection of John, 1st Baron Lumley, in which three monogrammed portraits were listed as being by Haunce Eworth
CARRACCI, Antonio
Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1583-1618 Painter, son of Agostino Carracci. He was born either c. 1583 (Baglione) or in 1589 (Bellori). His mother was a Venetian courtesan named Isabella. After his father's death, he joined the Roman household of his uncle Annibale Carracci. While Antonio may have collaborated with other studio assistants on the wall frescoes (1603-4) of the Galleria Farnese and the decoration (1606; commissioned from Francesco Albani) of some rooms in the Palazzo Mattei di Giove, Rome, his earliest undisputed works date from after Annibale's death in 1609. At that time, according to Monsignor G. B. Agucchi (Malvasia), Antonio returned briefly to Bologna, with the intention of joining Ludovico Carracci's studio, but the proposed collaboration came to nothing. A frescoed Vision of St Francis in the lower oratory of S Colombano was most probably painted during this Bolognese sojourn, and his Burial of Christ (Rome, Gal. Borghese) dates from c. 1609. He returned to Rome in 1610 and assisted Guido Reni in the Pauline Chapel of the Palazzo del Quirinale, where he painted Virtues and other subsidiary figures on the walls.
Sir John Gilbert,RA,PRWS
1817-1897