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 :. | Young Woman Seated | Camille Monet | Girl and Golden Hat | Nude on Cushions | Sailor Boy |
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William Parrott
English Painter, 1813-ca.1869
TURCHI, Alessandro
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1578-1649 Italian painter. He first studied in Verona with Felice Brusasorci in whose studio he was recorded in 1597 (Brenzoni). Dal Pozzo reported that Turchi completed Brusasorci's Fall of the Manna (Verona, S Giorgio) after his master's death in 1605; his early Veronese paintings, such as the Adoration of the Shepherds (1608; Verona, S Fermo), are ambitious, with many figures and elaborate backgrounds, echoing the local tradition of which Paolo Veronese was the most distinguished exponent. Turchi may have gone to Venice with his fellow pupil, Marcantonio Bassetti, before moving to Rome c. 1614-15. He was paid for work in the Sala Regia of the Palazzo del Quirinale in 1616-17 (Briganti), where he collaborated with a team of artists, among them Giovanni Lanfranco and Carlo Saraceni. His part was to paint an oval medallion with the Gathering of the Manna (in situ) in a style that suggests Lanfranco's influence. He soon found patrons for altarpieces and cabinet paintings, among them Cardinal Scipione Borghese. By 1619 he had settled permanently in Rome and was a member of the Accademia di S Luca,
Dirk van Delen
(born ca. 1605 - died May 16, 1671) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. According to Houbraken, he was born in Heusden, and was a student of Frans Hals. In 1626 he moved to Zeeland and became mayor of Arnemuiden. He specialized in architectural studies. Shortly after he was born his parents moved to Breda. He married in Middelburg in 1625. Though he is registered in Arnemuiden from the following year until his death, he became a member of the Middelburg Guild of St. Luke from 1639-1665. In 1666 he gave a painting to the Antwerp chamber of rhetoric Olyftak, that was a collaboration with the painter Theodoor Boeyermans. In 1668 he became a member of the Olyftak. The staffage of his baroque churches has at times been attributed to other painters, such as Anthonie Palamedesz, Dirck Hals, and Pieter Codde. He died in Arnemuiden.