Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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Bal au Moulin de la Galette, Montmartre, 1876.
R Selfportrait.jpg

Pierre-Auguste Renoir lived from 1841 to 1919. He was born on February 25, 1841, at Limoges, France and died on December 3, 1919, at Cagnes sur Mer, France. He was a famous painter of Impressionism, perhaps the only artist who never produced a sad painting. He believed that art needs to be pretty, and eventually left Impressionism to paint classical nudes.


The pain passes, but the beauty remains.

Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.

From the age of thirteen he worked as an apprentice painter at Paris, painting on porcelain wares (plates, cups, and vases). In 1862 Renoir began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris and there he met Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Jean-Frédéric Bazille. Masters, particularly those of the 18th century, like Antoine Watteau, François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, influenced his own painting throughout his career. He studied the art of this masters visiting the Louvre. Finding a new inspiration in nature, he, as other impressionist artists, displayed vibrant light and color instead of the somber blacks that had dominated previous painting. Gustave Courbet had also an important influence in his work. In 1881, he traveled to Algeria, Spain and Italy; he met Titian's masterpieces in Florence and the paintings of Raphael in Rome and Venice conquered him in a way that he will evoke in several canvases. His nude artworks allude simultaneously to the nudes of Rubens and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Renoir was a prolific painter with more than 4,000 paintings. Some art historians consider the following periods in Renoir's artworks: "The beginnings" 1858-1869, "Impressionism" 1870-1878, "dry" or "Ingres period" from 1881 to 1888 (a more decorative and traditional style), "the pearly period" after 1890 until 1897, Renoirs work moved in a new direction yet again... he returned to using thin brush strokes and became less concerned with outlines... epic nudes and domestic scenes", "... "late career" early twentieth century, Renoirs style changed again and he opted for stronger colors - often reds and oranges - and thick brush strokes... the female nude was a favorite subject of Renoirs and he depicted details of the scene through freely-brushed spots of color which fused his figures and their surroundings." [1]. The Rubenesque nudes he had been painting reached a level of unprecedented exaggeration in the twentieth century, culminating in the massive Bathers at the Musée d'Orsay ("The Bathers"). [2]

It was in the 1870s, that Renoir’s Impressionism style reached its peak... and he achieved recognition earlier than his friends. He worked at Argenteuil and in Paris. Renoir participated in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1874, 1876, 1877 and 1882. [3]

By the Water, 1880.
Dance at Bougival, 1882-1883.

Before his death Renoir had a supreme triumph, he saw his portrait "Madame Georges Charpentier" (1877), hanging in the Louvre.

Some of his most famous paintings are: "Le Pont des Arts et l'Institut de France", "La Loge", "The Swing", "Bal au Moulin de la Galette", "Two Sisters (On the Terrace)", "The Luncheon of the Boating Party", "Dance at Bougival", "The Large Bathers" (1884-1887), and "The Bathers" ("Three Bathers", 1918-1919); Bathers subject appeared frequently in Renoir's oeuvre.

No one, throughout the history of painting, represented the richness and sensuous beauty of the female form more successfully. Henry S. Francis. [4]

In his paintings women always have les visages féminins typiques de Renoir (female faces typical of Renoir).

Renoir's work seems always to be about pleasurable occasions, and reveals no great seriousness in his subjects. He apparently shocked his teacher Gleyre by saying, 'if painting were not a pleasure to me I should certainly not do it'. The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London.



On the Terrace, 1881.
The Swing, 1876.
Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881.


A short while before he died in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1919, he said the following to his nurse about painting: “I think I am beginning to understand something about it”. [5]


See: Pierre-Auguste Renoir/Gallery

See also

View From Cap Martin of Monte Carlo, ca. 1884.


Monet painting in his garden in Argenteuil, 1873.

External links

Grand Canal Venice, 1881.


Claude Monet (The Reader), 1874.
The Artist's Mother, 1860.
Crown of Roses, ca. 1858.