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For other persons named Renoir, see Renoir (disambiguation).
| Pierre-Auguste Renoir | |
 | |
| Birth name | Pierre-Auguste Renoir |
| Born | February 25 1841 Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France |
| Died | December 3 1919 (aged 78) Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d\'Azur, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Field | Painting |
| Famous works | Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, 1876 Luncheon of the Boating Party ,1880 |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (February 25, 1841–December 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".Read, Herbert: The Meaning of Art, page 127. Faber, 1931.
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china.Renoir, Jean: Renoir, My Father, pages 57-67. Collins, 1962. He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school.Vollard, Ambroise: Renoir, An Intimate Record, pages 24-29. Knopf, 1925. During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.
.jpg/58px-Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La loge (The Theater Box).jpg)
The Theater Box, 1874 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London
In 1862 he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet.Vollard, page 30. At times during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864,Wadley, Nicholas: Renoir, A Retrospective, page 15. Park Lane, 1989. recognition did not come for another ten years, due, in part, to the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War.
During the Paris Commune in 1871, while he painted on the banks of the Seine River, some members of a commune group thought he was a spy, and were about to throw him into the river when a commune leader, Raoul Rigault, recognized Renoir as the man who had protected him on an earlier occasion.Renoir, Jean, pages 118-21. Different and less life-threatening versions are offered by Paul Valéry and Vollard. In all accounts, however, their re-acquaintance led to great celebration.
In 1874, a ten-year friendship with Jules Le Coeur and his family ended,Wadley, page 15. and Renoir lost not only the valuable support gained by the association, but a generous welcome to stay on their property near Fontainebleau and its scenic forest. This loss of a favorite painting location resulted in a distinct change of subjects.
Renoir experienced his initial acclaim when six of his paintings hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. In the same year two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London.Wadley, page 15.
The Swing (La Balançoire), 1876, oil on canvas, Musée d\'Orsay, Paris
In 1881, he traveled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugène Delacroix, then to Madrid, in Spain, to see the work of Diego Velázquez. Following that he traveled to Italy to see Titian\'s masterpieces in Florence, and the paintings of Raphael in Rome. On January 15, 1882 Renoir met the composer Richard Wagner at his home in Palermo, Sicily. Renoir painted Wagner\'s portrait in just thirty-five minutes. In the same year, Renoir convalesced for six weeks in Algeria after contracting pneumonia, which would cause permanent damage to his respiratory system.Wadley, page 25.
In 1883, he spent the summer in Guernsey, creating fifteen paintings in little over a month. Most of these feature Moulin Huet, a bay in Saint Martin\'s, Guernsey. Guernsey is one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, and it has a varied landscape which includes beaches, cliffs, bays, forests, and mountains. These paintings were the subject of a set of commemorative postage stamps, issued by the Bailiwick of Guernsey in 1983.
While living and working in Montmartre, Renoir employed as a model Suzanne Valadon, who posed for him (The Bathers, 1885-7; Dance at Bougival, 1883)Wadley, pages 371, 374. and many of his fellow painters while studying their techniques; eventually she became one of the leading painters of the day.
In 1887, a year when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, and upon the request of the queen\'s associate, Phillip Richbourg, he donated several paintings to the "French Impressionist Paintings" catalog as a token of his loyalty.
In 1890 he married Aline Victorine Charigot, who, along with a number of the artist\'s friends, had already served as a model for Les Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881), and with whom he had already had a child, Pierre, in 1885.Wadley, page 25. After his marriage Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life, including their children and their nurse, Aline\'s cousin Gabrielle Renard. The Renoirs had three sons, one of whom, Jean, became a filmmaker of note and another, Pierre, became a stage and film actor.
Girls at the Piano, 1892, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Musée d\'Orsay, Paris.
Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of "Les Collettes," a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean coast.Wadley, page 28. Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life, even when arthritis severely limited his movement, and he was wheelchair-bound. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to adapt his painting technique. In the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers.André, Albert: Renoir. Crés, 1928.
During this period he created sculptures by directing an assistant who worked the clay. Renoir also used a moving canvas, or picture roll, to facilitate painting large works with his limited joint mobility.
In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters. Pierre-Auguste Renoir died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d\'Azur, on December 3.
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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 colourism of Eugène Delacroix and the luminosity of Camille Corot. He also admired the realism of Gustave Courbet and Édouard 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.Rey, Robert: La Renaissance du Sentiment Classique, Les Beaux Arts, 1931.
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 Tréhot, then the artist\'s mistress and inspiration for a number of paintings."From the Tour: Mary Cassatt", August Renoir. Accessed March 07, 2007.
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 Grenouillère, 1869).[1][2]
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 Chicago
The 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.Clark, Kenneth: The Nude, pages 154-61. Penguin, 1960. This is sometimes called his "Ingres period", as he concentrated on his drawing and emphasized the outlines of figures.Asked late in life if he felt an affinity to Ingres, he responded: "I should very much like to". Rey, quoted in Wadley, page 336.
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." For me, Renoir becomes a really great artist in the late nudes, above all in Les Grandes Baigneuses". David Sylvester, quoted by Wadley, page 378.
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.
Acknowledging modern criticism of Renoir\'s sensuality, Lawrence Gowing wrote:
| “ | "Is there another respected modern painter whose work is so full of charming people and attractive sentiment? Yet what lingers is not cloying sweetness but a freshness that is not entirely explicable...One feels the surface of his paint itself as living skin: Renoir\'s aesthetic was wholly physical and sensuous, and it was unclouded...These interactions of real people fulfilling natural drives with well-adjusted enjoyment remain the popular masterpieces of modern art (as it used to be called), and the fact that they are not fraught and tragic, without the slightest social unrest in view, or even much sign of the spacial and communal disjunction which some persist in seeking, is far from removing their interests." Gowing, Lawrence: " Renoir\'s Sense and Sentiment", Renoir: A Retrospective, page 373. Park Lane, 1989. | ” |
Albert Aurier, an art critic and early essayist on the impressionists, wrote in 1892:
| “ | "With such ideas, with such a vision of the world and of femininity, one might have feared that Renoir would create a work which was merely pretty and merely superficial. Superficial it was not; in fact it was profound, for if, indeed, the artist has almost completely done away with the intellectuality of his models in his paintings, he has, in compensation, been prodigal with his own. As to the pretty, it is undeniable in his work, but how different from the intolerable prettiness of fashionable painters." Aurier, Albert: "Renoir", Renoir: A Retrospective, page 184. Park Lane, 1989. | ” |
In a preview to the exhibition \'Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883\' at the National Gallery, London in spring 2007, The Guardian wrote that "Even Degas laughed at his friend\'s style, calling it as puffy as cotton wool," but that "if we\'re going to love him, we need to love his chocolate box qualities, too.""Angry young man", The Guardian, 12 February 2007
Two of Renoir\'s paintings have sold for more than $70 million. Bal au moulin de la Galette, Montmartre sold for $78.1 million in 1990.
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La Grenouillère, 1868, National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 110.jpg
Portrait of Alfred Sisley, 1868 |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 083.jpg
Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil, 1873, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 112.jpg
Portrait of Claude Monet, 1875, Musée d\'Orsay, Paris, France |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 094.jpg
Mme. Charpentier and her children, 1878, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir - By the Water.jpg
By the Water, 1880, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois |
Auguste Renoir - Le Déjeuner des canotiers.jpg
Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880-1881, The Phillips Collection Washington, DC |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 107.jpg
Portrait of Charles and Georges Durand-Ruel, 1882 |
Auguste Renoir - La danse à la campagne.jpg
The Country Dance, 1883, Musée d\'Orsay, Paris, France |
Girl with a hoop.jpg
Girl With a Hoop, 1885 |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Girl Braiding Her Hair (Suzanne Valadon).jpg
Girl Braiding Her Hair (Suzanne Valadon), 1885 |
Pierre Auguste Renoir - Portrait Berthe Morisot and daughter Julie.jpg
Portrait of Berthe Morisot and daughter Julie Manet, 1894 |
Pierre Auguste Renoir La famille d artiste.jpg
The Artist\'s Family, 1896, The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 106.jpg
Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1908 |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 113.jpg
Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel, 1910 |
Renoir Self-Portrait 1910.jpg
Self-portrait, 1910 |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 020.jpg
Diana the Huntress, 1867, The National Gallery of Art Washington, DC |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 002.jpg
Nude In The Sun, 1875, Musée d\'Orsay, Paris, France |
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Seating Girl, 1883 |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 021.jpg
The Large Bathers, 1887, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pa. |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 085.jpg
After The Bath, 1888 |
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Three Bathers, 1895, Cleveland Museum of Art Cleveland, Ohio |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Femme nue couchée (Gabrielle).jpg
Woman on a Couch (Gabrielle), 1906-1907 |
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After The Bath, 1910, Barnes Foundation, Merion Pennsylvania |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 030.jpg
Woman At The Well, 1910 |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Baigneuse assise s\'essuyant une jambe.jpg
Seated Bather Drying Her Leg, 1914, Musee de l\'Orangerie, Paris, France |
Pierre-Auguste Renoir 009.jpg
Women Bathers, 1916, National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden |
Pierre Auguste Renoir Les baigneuses.jpg
Bathers, 1918, Barnes Foundation, Merion Pennsylvania |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (category)
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
| Impressionism | |
|---|---|
| Original Impressionists | Frédéric Bazille · Eugène Boudin · Gustave Caillebotte · Mary Cassatt · Paul Cézanne · Edgar Degas · Armand Guillaumin · Édouard Manet · Claude Monet · Berthe Morisot · Camille Pissarro · Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Alfred Sisley |
| Patrons | Gustave Caillebotte · Henry O. Havemeyer · Ernest Hoschedé |
| Dealers | Paul Durand-Ruel · Georges Petit · Ambroise Vollard |
| American Impressionists | Frederick Carl Frieseke · Childe Hassam · Willard Metcalf · Lilla Cabot Perry · Theodore Robinson · John Henry Twachtman · J. Alden Weir |
| Other impressionists | Lovis Corinth · Max Liebermann · Max Slevogt · Konstantin Korovin · Valentin Serov · Francisco Oller y Cestero · Laura Muntz Lyall · Władysław Podkowiński · Nazmi Ziya Güran · Chafik Charobim |
| In other art forms | Impressionist music · Impressionism (literature) · French Impressionist Cinema |
| See also | Post-Impressionism |
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