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 :. | Genevieve Bernheim de Villers | jean Drawing | Girl with Parasol (Aline Nunes) | Portrait of the Artist's Father | Adele Besson |
Related Artists:
Bartolomeo Vivarini
Venice ca 1432-after 1491
Juan de Espinosa
Spanish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1590-1641, Spanish painter. Details of his life are scarce. He is documented in Madrid and Toledo between 1612 and 1626, and while he is recorded as having painted religious pictures and portraits (untraced), he is only known today for his still-life paintings. Documents relating to another artist of the same name, known as Juan de Espinosa, dating from 1645 to 1677, concern a different painter.
Jozef Chelmonski
(November 7, 1849 - April 6, 1914) was a Polish painter. Chełmoki was born in the village of Boczki near Łowicz in central Congress Poland, Russian Empire. His first drawing teacher was his father (a small leaseholder and administrator of Boczki village). After finishing high school in Warsaw, Jozef studied in Warsaw Drawing Class (1867-1871) and took private lessons from Wojciech Gerson. From 1871 to 1874 Chełmoki lived in Munich. He worked with Polish painters assembled around Jozef Brandt and Maksymilian Gierymski. There, he also studied for a few months at the academy of H. Anschutz and A. Strahuber. In 1872 and 1874 Chełmoki visited the Polish Territories (Poland, as an independent country, did not exist during this time), Tatra Mountains and Ukraine. His first paintings were done under the influence of Gerson. The works that followed were landscapes and villages. In 1875 Chełmoki went to Paris, where he had many important exhibitions and became known to the art scene. With many orders, the artistic level of his paintings decreased. From 1878 to 1887 Chełmoki visited Poland, Vienna and Venice. In 1887 he returned to Poland and in 1889 settled in the village of Kuklewka Zarzeczna. Contact with his homeland and nature are qualities revealed in his artworks. From that time are the best liked, or the most beloved of Chełmoki's paintings are paintings such as Partridge on the Snow, The Storks or Before Thunderstorm. Chełmoki represented the trend in art called "Polish Patriotic Painting". He died in Kuklewka near Grodzisk Mazowiecki in 1914.