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 :. | Girls Picking Flowers in a Meadow | Young Girl with a Falcon | Two Girls at the Piano | AlfredSisley | Sailor Boy |
Related Artists:
Bartholomeus Breenbergh
(before 13 November 1598 - after 3 October 1657) was a Dutch painter born in Deventer. Breenbergh established himself in Amsterdam and then in 1619 went to Rome. There he lived and worked with the Flemish painter Frans van de Kasteele and was heavily influenced by another Fleming, the landscape painter Paul Bril. From 1623, however, he came completely under the spell of Italian landscapes by the somewhat older Cornelis van Poelenburgheindeed, the works of Breenbergh and van Poelenburgh are sometimes very difficult of tell apart. Breenbergh in his turn influenced the French painter Claude Lorrain. Breenbergh was one of the founders of the Bentvueghels, where he was nicknamed "het fret". In 1633 Breenbergh returned to Amsterdam, where he remained until his death, and where he made paintings and etchings of Italian buildings. There he was influenced by the pre-Rembrandtists such as Pieter Lastman and Nicolaes Moeyaert, but he placed their Biblical and mythological scenes in Italian landscapes.
John Houghton Hague
1831-1934
johann friedrich august tischbein
German Painter, 1750-1812. 1750 Maastricht ?C Heidelberg 1812. First he was a pupil of his father Johann Valentin Tischbein (1715-1768) in Hildburghausen, from 1768 one of his uncle Johann Heinrich Tischbein the elder (1722-1789) in Kassel. Supported by Prince Friedrich von Waldeck he stayed in Paris from 1772 until 1777, where he studied at the academy of arts under N. B. L??pici?? (1735-1784). Afterwards he travelled to Rome, where he got in contact with the painters A.R. Mengs (1728-1779), J.L. David (1748-1825) and Fr.H. F??ger (1751-1818) and probably also with the English style of portrait painting. 1779 he travelled to Naples. In 1780 he returned to Arolsen via Vienna, Munich, Stuttgart and Kassel, where he worked for the Prince of Waldeck. From 1780 he was his councillor and court painter. During this time he made several journeys e.g. to Holland and after 1785 to Weimar where he met Wieland (1785), Schlegel (1792) and other important people. From 1795 he worked for Leopold III. of Anhalt-Dessau. 1800 he succeeded A. Fr. Oeser (1717-1799) as director of the academy of arts in Leipzig. From 1806 to 1808 he stayed in St Petersburg. He died 1812 when he visited his daughter Caroline Wilken (1783-1843) in Heidelberg