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 :. | Inthe St Cloud Park | Girl with a Hoop | The Pont des Arts the Institut de France | Madame Monet Reclining on a Sofa Reading Le Figaro | The Pont des Arts |
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Francesco Zuccarelli
Italian 1702-1788 1788). Italian painter and draughtsman, active in England. Zuccarelli training began in Florence, where he engraved the frescoes by Andrea del Sarto in SS Annunziata. He then studied in Rome under Paolo Anesi and learnt figure drawing from Giovanni Maria Morandi (1622-1717), although in this he never acquired any great skill. His earliest recorded paintings were Mary Magdalene and St Jerome (both untraced), which he contributed to the exhibition of the feast of St Luke in Florence in 1729. He also painted portraits. Around 1730 he moved to Venice and began painting landscapes exclusively. His interest in this field may have led to his becoming acquainted with the Welsh landscape painter Richard Wilson in 1750-51. Wilson painted a lively portrait of him (1751; London, Tate) in exchange for one of Zuccarellis landscapes. Zuccarelli avoided both the topographical type of Venetian view developed by Canaletto and the stormier landscapes of Marco Ricci, adopting instead a decorative landscape style of idealized Italian countryside. His subject-matter was usually unspecific rather than recognizably historical, biblical or mythological. For example, in the early 1740s he executed six paintings purporting to be scenes from the story of Jacob, but the paintings themselves bear few references to it (e.g. Landscape with Two Seated Women Embracing, 1743; Windsor Castle, Berks, Royal Col.).
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