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Born: 1841
Died: 1919
Summary of Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French Impressionist painter whose eye for beauty made him a renowned figure in the movement. In the latter three decades of the nineteenth century, he is best known for his paintings of busy Parisian modernism and leisure. Renoir began to experiment with Renaissance painting in the midst of his career, which prompted him to include more line and composition into his mature works and produce some of his era’s most enduring masterpieces.
Renoir was instrumental in the development of Impressionist style in the late 1860s, working with Claude Monet, but his work has a distinct human aspect that sets him apart. Renoir had a keen eye for both intimate domesticity and current styles, and his pictures of happy families and well-dressed Parisian pleasure seekers served as a link between Impressionism’s more experimental goals and a modern, middle-class art audience.
Renoir was the first Impressionist to recognise the limitations of a kind of painting focused only on optical sensations and light effects. Though his findings in this subject will always be important to his work, he reaffirmed the importance of composition and underlying structure in contemporary painting, developing a structured, monumental style that acknowledged the merits of High Renaissance art in his mature work.
Renoir’s example proved crucial for the major French high modernist trends of Fauvism and Cubism. The forefathers of these techniques, like Renoir, were more concerned with concerns of colour, composition, and depth than with rapid drawings of particular events. His well-balanced, colourful paintings served as a key link between older colourists such as Raphael, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Eugène Delacroix and 20th-century giants Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
Childhood
In Limoges, France’s central west area, Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born into a working-class family. The region is historically noteworthy as the birthplace of French porcelain, having attained that position in the nineteenth century. Renoir’s first creative employment, while he was in his teens, was as a painter in one of the town’s porcelain manufacturers, which was fitting. Renoir, the son of a tailor and a seamstress, had a steady hand and a talent for decorative effect, which earned him praise from his employers and helped him gain a growing customer base, which included a number of wealthy patrons for whom he painted picture hangings and decorations for fans and other luxury objects.
Renoir began making regular excursions to the Louvre in Paris in 1860 to study the work of French Rococo painters Jean-Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honore Fragonard, and François Boucher, as well as Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix, to compensate for the inadequate training he was getting in Limoges. Despite the fact that Delacroix and the Rococo artists worked nearly a century apart, Renoir saw parallels in their soft, free use of paint that revealed individual brushstrokes and their love of colour and movement over the Classical precision of meticulously ordered form.
Early Life
Renoir began his formal training in 1862 under Charles Gleyre, a Swiss-born academic painter who taught a number of talented painters, including Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, three future Impressionist colleagues with whom Renoir became close friends after entering Gleyre’s Paris studio.
Renoir and his new companions would go plein air painting in the picturesque Fontainebleau forest during their training. Unlike Monet and Sisley, however, Renoir was a studio painter who preferred to paint conventional portraits in the style of the 18th-century French artists he loved.
Renoir made Fontainebleau a favourite painting location and a regular visitor, thanks in part to his friend Jules Le Coeur, an art enthusiast who lived in Bourron-Marlotte, a commune on the forest’s southern edge. Renoir met seventeen-year-old Lise Tréhot through Le Coeur in 1865, and she became Renoir’s girlfriend and favourite model for several years. Tréhot posed for hundreds of portraits, including two in 1867: Diana the Huntress, which depicted her as a Greek goddess in the style of a Rococo picture, and Lise with a Parasol, which was well received at the 1868 French Salon.
Mid Life
Renoir’s early success began to deteriorate shortly after the brief but violent Franco-Prussian War (in which he fought) and the takeover of the French Commune in 1871. The Salon’s rejections greatly outweighed the acceptances, owing in part to the “unfinished” nature of his recent work.
Renoir’s circumstances had deteriorated to the point that he had to choose between paying models and purchasing paint. While several of his peers, such as Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, had stopped submitting work to the Salon, Renoir continued to do so until 1873, believing that approval was an essential criterion for success.
According to Petra Chu’s book Nineteenth-Century European Art: “Auguste Renoir, an Impressionist painter, wrote to his dealer [Paul] Durand-Ruel in 1881: ‘In Paris, there are hardly fifteen collectors capable of appreciating a painter without the Salon’s backing.’ And there are another 80,000 people who will not buy even a postcard unless the painter displays.'” Furthermore, Renoir’s connection with the Le Coeur family deteriorated in 1874, leaving him without a patron and the ability to reside in their house near Fontainebleau.
After the Impressionists’ canvases were generally criticised at the 1873 Salon, Renoir and his associates began preparing a separate show of their work, outside of the Salon’s artistic restrictions and jury system. On April 15, 1874, the first Impressionist group exhibition took place. While the exhibition resulted in few sales, it did bring Renoir to the attention of collector Victor Chocquet, whose portrait he would paint and who would become a financial lifesaver at this time.
Renoir had discreetly refrained from the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1878. He’d found financial independence owing to frequent portrait assignments (which led to more success in the Salon), but he’d grown disillusioned with the group’s idea of spontaneity, which he thought had eaten it. Renoir came to Italy for the first time shortly after distancing himself from the group of painters he helped create, a voyage made possible by a financial arrangement he had made with the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. During this time, he grew to believe that Impressionism lacked the structural underpinnings that had produced Renaissance artists like Raphael’s outstanding work.
Renoir was inspired by his journey to move away from Impressionism’s free, accidental character and toward more Classical notions of draughtsmanship, composition, and modelling. Renoir’s famous Luncheon of the Boating Party was painted between 1880 and 1881, soon before he left France, and it demonstrates an adjustment of his painting skills toward more compositional coherence. His mature work would no longer be only concerned with inventing new ways to convey the movement and colour of light and nature.
Late Life
Renoir continued to produce work at an amazing rate as the turn of the century neared, despite his constantly worsening health. He was now married and had three boys (the latest born in 1901). He suffered severe arthritis in his right arm as a result of a bicycle accident, and rheumatism in his left eye. He was largely confined to a wheelchair and had bandages over his hands by 1910, making painting a difficult task. Renoir’s troubles were relieved by the family’s acquisition of a house in Cagnes-sur-Mer, in the south of France, where the dry and warm environment provided occasional reprieve.
Renoir had befriended the art dealer Vollard in the preceding decade, who became both a significant patron and a valued counsellor to the artist when it came to subject matter selection. Renoir’s physical limitations were well known to Vollard, who suggested that he try sculpting in 1913, introducing him to Catalan-born sculptor Richard Guino. Renoir was able to create numerous successful works during his partnership with Guino, who mostly dealt with clay, despite his physical problems.
Renoir imbued his late paintings with an increasingly colossal style, influenced by his earlier travels to Spain to view Francisco Goya’s masterpieces. While his fellow Impressionists Claude Monet and Edgar Degas later in their careers pushed the effects of light almost to the point of abstraction, Renoir’s figures and landscapes developed a solid, almost sculptural aspect in his latter years.
Renoir died of a heart attack at his house in Cagnes-sur-Mer in the winter of 1919. Shortly after, he died on December 3, 1919, surrounded by his sons and with many of his paintings hanging in the Louvre among the French masterpieces he once studied.
Renoir and his colleague Monet are to Impressionism what Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are to Cubism: their experiments in painting together produced a completely contemporary visual vocabulary and marked off the creative area that the movement would grow to inhabit in the decades to come.
Famous Art by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Diana the Huntress
1867
When compared to Renoir’s later work, this beautifully constructed painting pales in comparison. Rather, what we witness is a young artist with a talent for oil painting and composition but no distinct voice of his own. Renoir spent most of his early years visiting the halls of the Louvre and other museums, studying the works of French artists from the 18th and early 19th centuries. He depicted his mistress Lise Tréhot as the Roman goddess Diana in this painting, a frequent Rococo portraiture cliché. Though his representation of a full-figured nude is reminiscent of his love of Realism à la Courbet, he achieves a Classical timelessness that Realism lacks.
Dance at the Moulin de la Galette
1876
Dance at the Moulin de la Galette is a picture of ordinary life in Montmartre’s affluent district, and is widely regarded as one of Renoir’s finest. The courtyard of the Moulin de la Galette, which is still open today, was a popular hangout for working-class drinkers, diners, and dancers. The sheer amount of people, details, and views to depict, along with the flickering lighting and natural movement that came with such a picture, provided Renoir with a genuine and unique task.
Portrait of Ambroise Vollard
1908
In the final years of Renoir’s career, Ambroise Vollard was a dealer, friend, and promoter of the artist’s work, even publishing a biography of the artist in 1925. Renoir honoured their relationship by painting Vollard in a variety of disguises. Portrait of Ambroise Vollard is a finely produced work that at once touches on the more contemporary creative explorations of Paul Cézanne (many points of view) and Henri Matisse (vast planes of colour), while preserving Renoir’s structure, colouring, and impressionistic application of paint.
BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)
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- Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French Impressionist painter whose eye for beauty made him a renowned figure in the movement.
- In the latter three decades of the nineteenth century, he is best known for his paintings of busy Parisian modernism and leisure.
- Renoir began to experiment with Renaissance painting in the midst of his career, which prompted him to include more line and composition into his mature works and produce some of his era’s most enduring masterpieces.
- Renoir was instrumental in the development of Impressionist style in the late 1860s, working with Claude Monet, but his work has a distinct human aspect that sets him apart.
- Renoir had a keen eye for both intimate domesticity and current styles, and his pictures of happy families and well-dressed Parisian pleasure seekers served as a link between Impressionism’s more experimental goals and a modern, middle-class art audience.
- Renoir was the first Impressionist to recognise the limitations of a kind of painting focused only on optical sensations and light effects.
- Though his findings in this subject will always be important to his work, he reaffirmed the importance of composition and underlying structure in contemporary painting, developing a structured, monumental style that acknowledged the merits of High Renaissance art in his mature work.
- Renoir’s example proved crucial for the major French high modernist trends of Fauvism and Cubism.
- The forefathers of these techniques, like Renoir, were more concerned with concerns of colour, composition, and depth than with rapid drawings of particular events.
- His well-balanced, colourful paintings served as a key link between older colourists such as Raphael, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Eugène Delacroix and 20th-century giants Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
