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 :. | The Mosque(Arab Festival) | Wilhelm Mublfeld | The Parisian Woman | The Great Bathers | Young Girl Reading |
Related Artists:
Louis Nicolas van Blarenberghe
painted The Battle of Fontenoy in
David van der Plas
David van der Plas (1647-1704), was a Dutch Golden Age portrait painter. David van der Plas became famous as a portrait painter, and his most illustrious patron was Cornelis Tromp. In 1684 he married Cornelia van der Gon of Haarlem, the daughter of the castellan (kastelein) of the Oude Doelen, the meeting quarters of the Haarlem schutterij (the building currently houses the Stadsbibliotheek Haarlem). David van der Plas' brother-in-law was the painter Govert van der Leeuw and his pupil was Jacob Appel. His wife Cornelia van der Gon was the rich heiress of the Amsterdam architect Adriaan Dortsman (ca. 1636-1682), who designed the round Lutheran church on the Singel. The marriage was childless, and Cornelia spent her time on her doll houses, which Dortsman had helped design and which Van der Plas helped decorate. The landscape painter Jan Wijnants also painted miniatures for these doll houses. Cornelia died in 1701, and after the death of Van der Plas, the doll houses were sold at auction to Sara Rothe, who used them to decorate her own doll houses.
Bela Ivanyi-Grunwald
(6 May 1867 - 24 September 1940) was a Hungarian painter, a leading member of the Nagybenya artists' colony and founder of the Kecskemet artists' colony. Born in Som, Ivenyi-Grenwald began his artistic studies under Bertalan Szekely and Keroly Lotz at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (1882-86) and continued them at Munich in 1886-87 and at the Academie Julian in Paris from 1887 to 1890. From 1891 he again worked in Munich; in 1894 he travelled with Ferenc Eisenhut to Egypt, where he painted several oriental-themed works. Beginning in 1889 he had regular exhibitions at the Palace of Art in Budapest. Characteristic of his early pictures is A Hader kardja ("The Warrior's Sword", 1890), a proto-Symbolist treatment of rural genre showing the influence of Jules Bastien-Lepage. After his return to Munich, Ivenyi-Grenwald painted a large-scale genre painting entitled Nihilistek sorsot heznak ("Nihilists Drawing Lots", 1893), a work as notable for its dramatic use of chiaroscuro as for its deeply felt subject-matter. In response to a state commission for the 1896 Millennium Exhibition in Budapest he produced an enormous academic history painting.