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 :. | Aline Charigot(Madame Renoir) | Two Girls Reading | Mother Anthony's Inn at Marlotte | Claude Monet Reading | Jeanne Samary |
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Cosimo Rosselli
Italian 1439-1507 Cosimo Rosselli Gallery Born in Florence, at the age of fourteen he became a pupil of Neri di Bicci, and in 1460 he worked as assistant to his cousin Bernardo di Stefano Rosselli. A first youthful work of Cosimo mentioned by Giorgio Vasari is the Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece in the third chapel on the left of the nave in Sant'Ambrogio in Florence. In the same church, on the wall of one of the chapels, is a fresco by Cosimo which Vasari praises highly, especially for a portrait of the young scholar Pico of Mirandola. The scene, a procession bearing a miracle-working chalice, is painted with vigor and less mannerism than most of this artist's work. A picture painted by Rosselli for the church of the Annunziata, with figures of SS. Barbara, Matthew and the Baptist, is in the Academy of Florence. Rosselli also spent some time in Lucca, where he painted several altar-pieces for various churches. A picture attributed to him, taken from the church of St. Girolamo at Fiesole, is now in the National Gallery of London. It is a large retable, with, in the center, St. Jerome in the wilderness kneeling before a crucifix, and at the sides standing figures of St. Damasus and St. Eusebius, St. Paula and St. Eustochium; below is a predella with small subjects. Though dry and hard in treatment, the figures are designed with much dignity. The Berlin Gallery possesses three pictures by Rosselli: The Virgin in Glory, The Entombment of Christ, and The Massacre of the Innocents. In 1480 Rosselli, together with the chief painters of Florence, was invited by Pope Sixtus IV to Rome to assist in the painting of the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. Three of these were executed by him The Destruction of Pharaohs Army in the Red Sea, Christ Preaching by the Lake of Tiberias, and The Last Supper. Rosselli's Sistine frescoes were partly painted by his assistant and son in law Piero di Cosimo, who was so called after Cosimo Rosselli. His chief pupil was Fra Bartolomeo. According to Vasari, Rosselli died in 1484, but this is a mistake, as his is known to be living on 25 November 1506
Nicolas Maes
1634-1693 Dutch Nicolas Maes Galleries Nicolaes Maes, also known as Nicolaes Maas (January 1634, Dordrecht - buried November 24, 1693, Amsterdam) was a Dutch Baroque painter of genre and portraits. Maes was the son of Gerrit Maes, a prosperous merchant, and Ida Herman Claesdr. In about 1648 he went to Amsterdam, where he entered Rembrandt's studio. Before his return to Dordrecht in 1653 Maes painted a few Rembrandtesque genre pictures, with life-size figures and in a deep glowing scheme of colour, like the Reverie at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Card Players at the National Gallery, and the Children with a Goat Carriage. So closely did his early style resemble that of Rembrandt, that the last-named picture, and other canvases in the Leipzig and Budapest galleries and in the collection of Lord Radnor, were or are still ascribed to Rembrandt. In his best period, from 1655 to 1665, Maes devoted himself to domestic genre on a smaller scale, retaining to a great extent the magic of colour he had learnt from Rembrandt. Only on rare occasions did he treat scriptural subjects, as in Hagar's Departure, which has been ascribed to Rembrandt. His favorite subjects were women spinning, or reading the Bible, or preparing a meal. While he continued to reside in Dordrecht until 1673, when he settled in Amsterdam, he visited or even lived in Antwerp between 1665 and 1667. His Antwerp period coincides with a complete change in style and subject. He devoted himself almost exclusively to portraiture, and abandoned the intimacy and glowing color harmonies of his earlier work for a careless elegance which suggests the influence of Van Dyck. So great indeed was the change, that it gave rise to the theory of the existence of another Maes, of Brussels. Maes is well represented at the London National Gallery by five paintings: The Cradle, The Dutch Housewife, The Idle Servant, The Card Players, and a man's portrait. At Amsterdam, besides the splendid examples to be found at the Rijksmuseum, is the Inquisitive Servant of the Six collection. At Buckingham Palace is The Listening Girl (repetitions exist), and at Apsley House Selling Milk and The Listener. Other notable examples are at the Berlin, Brussels, St Petersburg, the Hague, Frankfort, Hanover and Munich galleries.
MAN, Cornelis de
Dutch Baroque Era Painter and Printmaker, 1621-1706