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 :. | Oarsmen at Chatou | Landscape with River | Young Girl With Daisies | Yvonne and Christine Lerolle Playing the Piano | Landscape on the Coast near Menton |
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William Robinson Leigh
(September 23, 1866 - March 11, 1955) is a noted American artist, who specialized in Western scenes. He was born at Maidstone Manor Farm, Berkeley County, West Virginia. He entered the Maryland Institute at age 14, then attended the Royal Academy in Munich. He returned to the United States and worked painting cycloramas and as a magazine illustrator. He married and fathered William Colston Leigh, Sr. (1901-1992). In 1906, Leigh traveled to the American West and maintained a studio in New York City. In 1933, he wrote and illustrated The Western Pony. He also traveled to Africa and published a book Frontiers of Enchantment (1938). Hs adventures were chronicled in a number of popular magazines including Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and Colliers.He is known for painting the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Forest, but his primary interest were the Hopi and Navajo Indians
Robert Scott Duncanson
(1821 - December 21, 1872) was born in Seneca County, New York in 1821.Duncansones father was a Canadian of Scottish descent and his mother was an African American, thus making him ea freeborn person of color.e Duncanson, an artist who is relatively unknown today, painted America, both physically and figuratively, at a time when the country was in turmoil. Beautiful and serene, Duncansones work sheds light on American art that has been forgotten over the years.
Egbert van der Poel
Egbert van der Poel (Delft, 1621 - Rotterdam, 1664) was a Dutch Golden Age genre and landscape painter, son of a Delft goldsmith. He may possibly have been a student of Esaias van de Velde and of Aert van der Neer. According to the RKD he was the brother of the painter Adriaen Lievensz van der Poel and a student of Cornelis Saftleven in Rotterdam. Van der Poel was registered with the Guild of St Luke in Delft on October 17, 1650, where he is listed as a landscape painter. In 1651 van der Poel married Aeltgen Willems van Linschooten in Maassluis, near Rotterdam. His most famous paintings depict the Delft gunpowder explosion of October 12, 1654 and its aftermath; he and his wife were living in the area at the time. Egbert and Aeltgen van der Poel had a son and three daughters. He died in Rotterdam in 1664.