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 :. | By the Seashore | Reclining Nude | Idylle | Rapha Maitre | Boating Party at Chatou |
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Dwight William Tryon
(August 13, 1849 ?C July 1, 1925) was an American landscape painter in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His work was influenced by James McNeill Whistler, and he is best-known for his landscapes and seascapes painted in a tonalist style. Tryon was born in Hartford, Connecticut. His father was killed in a gun accident before Tryon reached four years of age, and Tryon was raised by his mother on his grandparent's farm in East Hartford. His interest in art evolved naturally. As a young man Tryon took a job at a prominent Hartford bookstore and studied art instruction manuals from the store shelves. He also took to sketching the surrounding countryside during his off hours Tryon sold his first painting in 1870. After exhibiting and selling work locally, he successfully exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1873. His artistic convictions affirmed, Tryon married, quit his job at the bookstore and became a full-time artist. Some of his first works from this period are seascapes and harbor views executed in a luminist manner. Soon after, however, Tryon's style shifted towards the Barbizon school, which was then becoming popular among American artists. He may have been influenced by the works of George Inness and Alexander Helwig Wyant. In 1876 Tryon decided to advance his skills through a formal study of art. He sold all of his paintings at auction and, with the help of a benefactor, traveled to France with his wife. He enrolled in the atelier of Jacquesson de la Chevreuse, and took classes at the École des Beaux-Arts. He also received instruction from Charles-François Daubigny, Henri Harpignies, and Jean Baptiste-Antoine Guillemet. Impressionism was blossoming in France all around Tryon, but he was not swayed by the new style and remained comfortably within the realm of the Barbizon school. Tryon traveled and sketched Europe with his wife, and met Abbott Handerson Thayer and his wife with whom he became friends. He returned to the United States in 1881 and settled in New York City where he taught and painted landscapes. In New York, Tryon became friends with artists Robert Swain Gifford and Thomas Dewing. He became an early member of the Society of American Artists and continued to exhibit paintings to the National Academy of Design. He also became a member of the American Water Color Society and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (now The American Academy of Arts and Letters). On the advice of Gifford, Tryon and his wife built a summer house in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts in 1887. Though he would continue to spend each winter in New York City, South Dartmouth became Tryon's home for the rest of his life. The coastal area appealed to Tryon's aesthetic sensibilities and allowed him to indulge in fishing, his favorite pastime. By the late 1880s Tryon began painting landscapes in what would become his mature and iconic style. Working most often in oil, Tryon's paintings typically feature a group or broken row of trees in the middle distance, often colored in an autumnal hue, separating a glowing sky above and a foreground marsh or pasture below. He also continued to paint the sea in his mature career, often employing pastel to show a bare expanse of water, sky and beach in various weather and light. He exhibited his works nationally but tended to favor The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the Montross Gallery in New York. A Detroit industrialist, Charles Lang Freer, first bought a painting by Tryon in 1889 and became Tryon's most important patron. Freer eventually bought dozens of Tryon's paintings, including many of his best works, and worked closely with Tryon in the interior design of his Detroit home. Freer, a major collector of Asian art and works by James McNeill Whistler, went on to establish the Freer Gallery of Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, where many works by Tryon can be seen today. Took the coveted First Prize for his painting Salt-Marsh, December at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition that was held in Nashville, Tennessee in 1897. He is described in the "Fine Art Catalogue" which is copyrighted by Theodore Cooley as follows: William Tryon is an American landscape painter whose pictures are greatly sought for their delicacy of coloring and refinement of feeling. A pupil of Daubdigny, he is, like that artist, a painter of country life - the idyllic rusticity of apple trees in bloom, of waving cornfields, of shining valleys and streams rippling gently to the sea. He is especially fine in the silvery-gray atmosphere. In addition to his painting, Tryon taught at Smith College from 1886 to 1923, visiting part time to critique students' work and, late in his career, establishing the Tryon Gallery of Art. He died of cancer in South Dartmouth on July 1, 1925.
Joannes Fijt
(15 March 1611 - 11 September 1661) was a Flemish Baroque animal painter and etcher. Fyt was born in Antwerp, where he was baptized on 15 June 1611, he was registered in 1621 as apprentice to Hans van den Berghe, who was a restorer of old pictures rather than a painter of new ones. Fyt then trained with Frans Snyders between about 1629-31, during which time, at the age of twenty, he entered the guild of St Luke as a master. From then until his death in 1661, he produced a vast number of paintings in which the bold facility of Frans Snyders is united to the powerful effects of Rembrandt, and harmonies of gorgeous tone are not less conspicuous than freedom of touch and a true semblance of nature. He left Antwerp for Paris in 1633, travelling on to Italy the following year, where he worked in Venice and probably visited Rome (as he later joined the Guild of Romanists back in Antwerp). By 1641 he was back in Antwerp, where he married in 1654. Hunting trophiesFyt excelled in the rendering of animal life in its most varied forms. He may have been less correct in outline, less bold in action than Snyders, but he was much more skilful and more true in the reproduction of the coat of deer, dogs, greyhounds, hares and monkeys, whilst in realizing the plumage of peacocks, woodcocks, ducks, hawks, and cocks and hens, he had no equal, nor was any artist even of the Dutch school more effective in relieving his compositions with accessories of tinted cloth, porcelain ware, vases and fruit. He was not clever at figures, and he sometimes trusted for these to the co-operation of Cornelius Schut or Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, whilst his architectural backgrounds were sometimes executed by Quellyn. Silenus amongst Fruit and Flowers, in the Harrach collection at Vienna, Diana and her Nymphs with the Produce of the Chase, in the Belvedere at Vienna, and Dead Game and Fruit in front of a Triumphal Arch, belonging to Baron von Rothschild at Vienna, are specimens of the co-operation respectively of Schut, Willeborts and Quellyn. They are also Fyt's masterpieces. The earliest dated work of the master is a cat grabbing at a piece of dead poultry near a hare and birds, belonging to Baron Cetto at Munich, and executed in 1644. The latest is a Dead Snipe with Ducks, of 1660, sold with the Jäger collection at Cologne in 1871. Great power is shown in the bear and boar hunts at Munich and Ravensworth castle. A Hunted Roedeer with Dogs in the Water, in the Berlin Museum, has some of the life and more of the roughness of Snyders, but lacks variety of tint and finish. A splendid specimen is the Page and Parrot near a table covered with game, guarded by a dog staring at a monkey, in the Wallace collection. With the needle and the brush Fyt was equally clever. He etched 16 plates, and those representing dogs are of their kind unique.
Octave Penguilly - L Haridon
Paris 1811 - Paris 1870. French Painter.