Pierre-Auguste Renoir

French, 1841 - 1919

BiographyProminent member of the French Impressionist group of painters. Renoir's art is a celebration of the beauty of women and nature; his images both of modern Parisian life and of idealized figures in a timeless landscape suggest an enchanted and radiant world. He trained initially as a porcelain painter and in 1861 entered the studio of Charles Gleyre (1808–74) where he met Sisley, Bazille, and Monet. His early canvases, indebted to Courbet, are sombre, but in 1869 he painted with Monet at the fashionable bathing establishment La Grenouillère on the Seine, where he developed the dappled light effects and broken brush strokes of Impressionism. He exhibited at the first three Impressionist exhibitions (1874, 1876, and 1877) and throughout this decade painted both loose and unstructured landscapes, of bright city streets, sunlit meadows, and gardens, and more highly finished scenes of the charm of modern Parisian life, such as Ball at the Moulin de la Galette (1876; Paris, Mus. d'Orsay). But he also won success at the Paris Salon with his Portrait of Mme Charpentier and her Children (1878; New York, Met. Mus.) and enjoyed the support of wealthy patrons. In 1881 Renoir, troubled by the limitations of Impressionism, visited Italy, where he studied ancient Roman and Renaissance art, and sought a new grandeur and simplicity. The Umbrellas (1880s; London, NG), in which soft, vibrant touches contrast with a new emphasis on line and form, marks a change of direction, and from the mid-1880s Renoir abandoned Impressionist spontaneity and modern subject matter. His landscapes, such as The Grape Pickers at Lunch (c. 1888; Los Angeles, Armand Hammer Coll.), suggest a rural Arcadia, and look back to the enchantment of French 18th-century art. But above all Renoir painted the nude, and in a series of monumental Bathers he sought to renew his links with the traditions of European figure painting. His Bathers (1884–7; Philadelphia Mus.) is tightly designed, with an emphasis on line and a pale, fresco-like surface. From 1903 Renoir was based at Cagnes, on the Mediterranean coast, and here his palette became warmer, his touch more fluid, and his forms, now reminiscent of Titian and Rubens, more voluptuous and massive; both his nudes, and his images of women at their toilet, are painted in brilliant reds and oranges, evocative of the timeless landscape of the warm south. In his final years, when he was ill, and with his hands paralysed, Renoir's assistants, closely supervised by the painter, realized his massive female nudes as bronze sculptures.

Langdon, Helen. "Renoir, Pierre-Auguste." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e2203 (accessed March 7, 2012).

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