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 :. | Gabrielle with a Rose | Box at the Theatre | Bathers | The Child with its Nurse | Two Women in Blue Blouses |
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William Andrews Nesfield
British Painter, 1793-1881 was born in Lumley Park, County Durham. In 1808, after the death of William's mother, the family moved the few miles to Brancepeth where his father became rector of St Brandon's Church. His stepmother was Marianne Mills of Willington Hall, whose nephew was the noted architect Anthony Salvin. William's younger sister in fact married Salvin. Nesfield was educated at Durham School, then located on Palace Green, before entering the army. He fought under Wellington in Spain and at Waterloo and also served for two years in Canada. He retired in 1816 and took up a career as a painter of watercolours, particularly of waterfalls, earning the praise of John Ruskin in Modern Painters. While still exhibiting at the Old Water Colour Society, Nesfield began work as a professional landscape architect, with the encouragement of Salvin. From 1840 until his death he was responsible, either singly or with his sons Arthur Markham and William Eden for no fewer than 259 commissions in the British Isles.
Fernand cormon
French Academic Painter, 1845-1924 French painter. He studied initially in Brussels under Jean-Fran?ois Portaels. In 1863 he returned to Paris, where for three years he was a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel and Eug?ne Fromentin. He made his d?but at the Salon in 1868 and in 1870 received a medal for the Marriage of the Niebelungen (1870; ex-Mus. B.-A., Lisieux, 1970). His painting the Death of King Ravana (1875; Toulouse, Mus. Augustins), taken from the Indian epic poem the Ramayana, was criticized for the choice of an obscure subject but was nevertheless awarded the Prix de Salon in 1875. Soon afterwards Cormon left France for Tunisia. After his return in 1877 he exhibited regularly at the Salon until his death, establishing a reputation as a painter of historical and religious subjects; he also produced some portraits.
STRIGEL, Hans II
German painter, Swabian school (active 1450-1480 in Memmingen). Painter. The panels of the Montfort-Werdenberg Altarpiece and a Deposition mural (1477), fragment of a series in the church at Tiefenbach, Allgäu, are documented as his. They show an artist in the tradition of Hans Multscher, using strongly foreshortened perspectives for an emphatic relaying of realities. In the 1470s he attempted to tone down the contrasts, to organize his figures after the manner of the Master of Sterzing: a change of style shown in the panels of the Mickhausener altar (Budapest, Mus. F.A.) and the Saints and Passion scenes in the Oberhaus-Museum