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 :. | Landscape on the Coast near Menton | The Clown | Reclining Nude(The Baker) | Julie Manet | Leontine and Coco |
Related Artists:
Adrien Manglard
France (1695 -1760 ) - Painter
Michael Sweerts
Flemish 1618-1664 Michiel Sweerts (September 29, 1618 - 1664), also known as Michael Sweerts, was a Flemish painter of the Baroque period, active in Rome (1645-1656) in the style of the Bamboccianti. The Bamboccianti were known for depicting genre scenes of daily life. Born in Brussels, he arrived in Rome in the mid 1640s, and rapidly moved into the circle of Flemish painters that had arrayed around Pieter van Laer, and that resided near Santa Maria del Popolo. In 1647, he attended meetings of the Accademia di San Luca, although not as a member. By 1659, he had returned to Brussels, where he joined the painter's guild. He appears to have become mentally unstable in his last years. In Amsterdam, he joined the Jesuits as a "lay Brother" rather than a priest, and sailed from Marsaille to the East with a missionary group. Travelling to Jerusalem, and from there to Goa, where after causing tribulations to those around him, he died. Sweerts is an enigmatic and difficult artist to categorize, since he seems to have absorbed a variety of influences to create an eclectic hybrid that can be described as a Netherlandish genre adaptation of an early tenebrist styles: a blend of Vermeer's genre of painting and Caravaggio-influenced full bodied figures.
Robert Lefere
Robert Jacques François Faust Lefevre (24 September 1755, Bayeux - 3 October 1830, Paris) was a French painter of portraits, history paintings and religious paintings. He was heavily influenced by Jacques-Louis David and his style s reminiscent of the antique. Robert Lefevre made his first drawings on the papers of a procureur to whom his father had apprenticed him. With his parents' consent, he abandoned this apprenticeship and walked from Caen to Paris to become a student of Jean-Baptiste Regnault (in whose studio he met and became friends with Charles Paul Landon). At the 1791 Paris Salon he exhibited his Dame en velours noir, the point of departure for his reputation. Lefevre made 1805 the portrait empress Josephine. 1807 manufactured the counterpart of emperor Napoleon Louis-Andre-Gabriel Bouchet. Napoleon gave both paintings to the city Aachen 1807, where they are today in the city hall and decorate the entrance hall. His other portraits of Napoleon, Josephine, Madame Laetitia, Guerin, Carle Vernet (a portrait which is now at the Louvre) and pope Pius VII made him a fashionable portrait artist and one of the main portraitists of the imperial personalities, a reputation sealed by his portrait of Napoleon's new wife Marie Louise. On the Bourbon Restoration Robert Lefevre painted a portrait of Louis XVIII for the Chambre des Pairs and received the cross of the Legion d'honneur and the title of First Painter to the King, losing the latter on the July Revolution. He painted a large number of portraits and history paintings. The main example of his portraits are those of Malherbe (Bibliotheque publique de Caen), Charles X, the duchesse deAngouleme, the duchesse de Berry, Charles-Pierre-François Augereau duc de Castiglione (Musee de Versailles), and of Dominique Vivant-Denon. Two of his mythological paintings - Love sharpening his arrows and Love disarmed by Venus (t. 1,84 sur 1,30 ), were engraved by Desnoyers - the latter is reproduced in le Nu Ancien et Moderne. His most notable history paintings are his Phocion getting ready to drink hemlock, Roger delivering Angelique, Heloïse and Abelard and a Crucifixion for the Mont Valerien. His last painting was The Apotheosis of Saint Louis for the Cathedral of La Rochelle.