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 :. | Marie Meunier | Girl with a Fan | Therse Berard | Woman with Lilacs | Baigneuse se Coiffant |
Related Artists:
FLEGEL, Georg
German painter (b. 1566, Olomouc, d. 1638, Frankfurt am Main). was a German painter, best known for his still life works. Flegel was born in Olmetz (Olomouc), Moravia. Around 1580 he moved to Vienna, where he became the assistant to Lucas van Valckenborch I, a painter and draughtsman. Flegel and his employer later moved to Frankfurt, which at the time was an important art-dealing city. As an assistant, he inserted items such as fruit, flowers, and table utensils into Valckenborch's works. In a period of about 30 years (c. 1600-1630), he produced 110 watercolor pictures, mostly still life images which often depicted tables set for meals and covered with food, flowers, and the occasional animal.
HOLBEIN, Hans the Elder
(b. 1460/65, Augsburg, d. 1524, Isenheim was a German painter. He was born in Augsburg, Bavaria and died in Isenheim, Alsace. He and his brother Sigismund Holbein painted religious works in the late Gothic style. Hans the Elder was a pioneer and leader in the transformation of German art from the Gothic to the Renaissance style. He was also a woodcut artist and an illustrator of books, and was a church window designer.
WILLAERTS, Adam
Dutch painter (b. 1577, Antwerpen, d. 1664, Utrecht) During his early years in Antwerp he was impressed with the colourful paintings of the Fleming Jan Breughel the elder, but the subject and style of his earliest known picture, Dutch East Indiamen off the West African Coast (1608; Amsterdam, Hist. Mus.), presumably painted after the artist's arrival in Holland, shows the influence of the Dutch marine painter Hendrick Cornelisz. Vroom. In this painting Willaerts adopted Vroom's austere compositional scheme of an uninterrupted horizontal expanse of water with no framing devices,