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Pierre Auguste Renoir
(Feb. 25, 1841, Limoges - Dec.3, 1919, Cagnes) French Oil Painting Artist Biography.
Pierre Auguste Renoir, the son of a tailor in Limoges, in 1854 he began work as a painter in a porcelain factory, gaining experience with the light, fresh colors that were to distinguish his Impressionist work and also learning the importance of good craftsmanship. Renoir saved the money he earned from painting china, fans and window shades to move to Paris. His early works were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling color and light.
His predilection towards light-hearted themes was also influenced by the great Rococo masters, Gustave Courbet and the Old Masters in the Louvre. In 1862 he entered the studio of Gleyre and there formed a lasting friendship with Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley. He painted with them in the Barbizon district and became a leading member of the group of Impressionists who met at the Café Guerbois. With Impressionism in the late 1860s, Renoir began using broken brushstrokes, his color became lighter and he composed his oil canvases in patches of colored light. Unlike Monet, Renoir was interested in the figure. His relationship with Monet was particularly close at this time and their paintings of the beauty spot called La Grenouillère done in 1869 are regarded as the classic early statements of the Impressionist style. Like Monet, Renoir endured much hardship early in his career, but he began to achieve success as a portrait artist in the late 1870s when his portrait oil paintings were accepted by the Paris Salon, whose wide audience helped him market his artwork. He was freed from financial worries after the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel began buying his work regularly after 1881.
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, Bathers (1884-87). With success as a portrait painter, Renoir traveled widely. In 1881, having "wrung Impressionism dry," he went to Italy. Under the Renaissance masters influences, he aimed at classic form while retaining the Impressionist palette's luminosity, it inspired him to seek a greater sense of solidarity in his work. The change in attitude is seen in The Umbrellas (National Gallery, London), which was evidently begun before the visit to Italy and finished afterwards. The two little girls on the right are painted with the feathery brush-strokes characteristic of his Impressionist manner, but the figures on the left are done in a crisper and drier style, with duller coloring. After a period of experimentation in the mid 1880s, he developed a softer and more supple kind of painting. At the same time he turned from contemporary themes and still life to more timeless subjects, particularly nudes, but also pictures of young girls in unspecific settings. As his style became grander and simpler he also took up mythological subjects and the female type he preferred became more mature and ample. In the 1890s Renoir began to suffer from rheumatism and from 1903, by which time he was world famous, he lived in the warmth of the south of France. The rheumatism eventually crippled him, by 1912 he was confined to a wheelchair, but continued to paint with a brush strapped to his hand until the end of his life and in his last years he also took up sculpture, directing assistants to act as his hands.
Pierre Auguste Renoir is perhaps the best-loved of all the Impressionists, for his subjects, pretty children, flowers, beautiful landscape scenes, above all lovely women, have instant appeal and he communicated the joy he took in them with great directness. "Why shouldn't art be pretty?", he said, "There are enough unpleasant things in the world." He was one of the great worshippers of the female form and he said "I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it." One of his sons was the celebrated film director Jean Renoir. Pierre-Auguste Renoir helped found Impressionism, freeing painting from having to tell a story. Artists could simply capture what they saw and the art world was changed forever from one of the great worlds artists.
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