Pierre-Auguste Renoir, commonly known as Auguste Renoir (/ˈrɛnwɑːr, rənˈwɑːr/; French: [pjɛʁ oɡyst ʁənwaʁ]; 25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919), was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially femininesensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau."[1]
He was the father of actor Pierre Renoir (1885–1952), filmmaker Jean Renoir (1894–1979) and ceramic artist Claude Renoir (1901–1969). He was the grandfather of the filmmaker Claude Renoir (1913–1993), son of Pierre.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, in 1841. His father, Léonard Renoir, was a tailor of modest means, so in 1844, Renoir's family moved to Paris in search of more favorable prospects. The location of their home, in rue d’Argenteuil in central Paris, placed Renoir in proximity to the Louvre. Although the young Renoir had a natural proclivity for drawing, he exhibited a greater talent for singing. His talent was encouraged by his teacher, Charles Gounod, who was the choir-master at the Church of St Roch at the time. However, due to the family’s financial circumstances, Renoir had to discontinue his music lessons and leave school at the age of thirteen to pursue an apprenticeship at a porcelain factory.[2][3]
Although Renoir displayed a talent for his work, he frequently tired of the subject matter and sought refuge in the galleries of the Louvre. The owner of the factory recognized his apprentice’s talent and communicated this to Renoir’s family. Following this, Renoir started taking lessons to prepare for entry into Ecole des Beaux Arts. When the porcelain factory adopted mechanical reproduction processes in 1858, Renoir was forced to find other means to support his learning.[3] Before he enrolled in art school, he also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans.[4]
In 1862, he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet.[5] At times, during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Renoir had his first success at the Salon of 1868 with his painting Lise with a Parasol (1867), which depicted Lise Tréhot, his lover at the time.[6] Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864,[7] recognition was slow in coming, partly as a result of the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War.
During the Paris Commune in 1871, while Renoir painted on the banks of the Seine River, some Communards thought he was a spy and were about to throw him into the river, when a leader of the Commune, Raoul Rigault, recognized Renoir as the man who had protected him on an earlier occasion.[8]
In 1874, a ten-year friendship with Jules Le Cœur and his family ended,[9] and Renoir lost not only the valuable support gained by the association but also 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 was inspired by the style and subject matter of previous modern painters Camille Pissarro and Edouard Manet.[10] After a series of rejections by the Salon juries, he joined forces with Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and several other artists to mount the first Impressionist exhibition in April 1874, in which Renoir displayed six paintings. Although the critical response to the exhibition was largely unfavorable, Renoir's work was comparatively well received.[6] That same year, two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London.[9]
Hoping to secure a livelihood by attracting portrait commissions, Renoir displayed mostly portraits at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876.[11] He contributed a more diverse range of paintings the next year when the group presented its third exhibition; they included Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette and The Swing.[11] Renoir did not exhibit in the fourth or fifth Impressionist exhibitions, and instead resumed submitting his works to the Salon. By the end of the 1870s, particularly after the success of his painting Mme Charpentier and her Children (1878) at the Salon of 1879, Renoir was a successful and fashionable painter.[6]
In 1881, he traveled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugène Delacroix,[12] then to Madrid, 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 15 January 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, after contracting pneumonia which permanently damaged his respiratory system, Renoir convalesced for six weeks in Algeria.[13]
In 1883, Renoir spent the summer in Guernsey, one of the islands in the English Channel with a varied landscape of beaches, cliffs, and bays, where he created fifteen paintings in little over a month. Most of these feature Moulin Huet, a bay in Saint Martin's, Guernsey. 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 Suzanne Valadon as a model, who posed for him (The Large Bathers, 1884–87; Dance at Bougival, 1883)[14] and many of his fellow painters; during that time she studied their techniques and eventually became one of the leading painters of the day.
In 1887, the year when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, and upon the request of the queen's associate, Phillip Richbourg, Renoir donated several paintings to the "French Impressionist Paintings" catalog as a token of his loyalty.
In 1890, he married Aline Victorine Charigot, a dressmaker twenty years his junior,[15] who, along with a number of the artist's friends, had already served as a model for Le Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party – she is the woman on the left playing with the dog) in 1881, and with whom he had already had a child, Pierre, in 1885.[13] 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: Pierre Renoir (1885-1952), who became a stage and film actor; Jean Renoir (1894-1979), who became a filmmaker of note; and Claude Renoir (1901-1969), who became a ceramic artist.
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.[16] Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life even after his arthritis severely limited his mobility. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to change his painting technique. It has often been reported that in the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers,[17] but this is erroneous; Renoir remained able to grasp a brush, although he required an assistant to place it in his hand.[18] The wrapping of his hands with bandages, apparent in late photographs of the artist, served to prevent skin irritation.[18]
In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with those of the old masters. During this period, he created sculptures by cooperating with a young artist, Richard Guino, who worked the clay. Due to his limited joint mobility, Renoir also used a moving canvas, or picture roll, to facilitate painting large works.[18]
Renoir's portrait of Austrian actress Tilla Durieux (1914) contains playful flecks of vibrant color on her shawl that offset the classical pose of the actress and highlight Renoir's skill just five years before his death.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir's great-grandson, Alexandre Renoir, has also become a professional artist. In 2018, the Monthaven Arts and Cultural Center in Hendersonville, Tennessee hosted an exhibition of Alexandre's works titled "Beauty Remains." The exhibition title comes from a famous quote by Pierre-Auguste who, when asked why he continued to paint with his painful arthritis in his advanced years, once said "The pain passes, but the beauty remains."[19]
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.
Portrait of Mademoiselle Irène Cahen d'Anvers (La Petite Irène), 1880, Foundation E.G. Bührle, Zürich[20]
His initial paintings show the influence of the colorism 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. Renoir admired Edgar Degas' sense of movement. Another painter Renoir greatly admired was the 18th-century master François Boucher.[21]
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 a "student" piece, Renoir's heightened personal response to female sensuality is present. The model was Lise Tréhot, the artist's mistress at that time, and inspiration for a number of paintings.[22]
In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air (outdoors), 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, an effect known today as diffuse reflection. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet worked side-by-side, depicting the same scenes (La Grenouillère, 1869).
One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du 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.
The works of his early maturity were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling color 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. 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.[23] Concentrating on his drawing and emphasizing the outlines of figures, he painted works such as Blonde Bather (1881 and 1882) and The Large Bathers (1884–87; Philadelphia Museum of Art) during what is sometimes called his "Ingres period".[24]
After 1890 he changed direction again. To dissolve outlines, as in his earlier work, he returned to thinly brushed color. From this period onward he concentrated on monumental nudes and domestic scenes, fine examples of which are Girls at the Piano, 1892, and Grandes Baigneuses, 1887. The latter painting is the most typical and successful of Renoir's late, abundantly fleshed nudes.[25]
A prolific artist, he created 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. The single largest collection of his works—181 paintings in all—is at the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia.
A five-volume catalogue raisonné of Renoir's works (with one supplement) was published by Bernheim-Jeune between 1983 and 2014.[26] Bernheim-Jeune is the only surviving major art dealer that was used by Renoir. The Wildenstein Institute is preparing, but has not yet published, a critical catalogue of Renoir's work.[27] A disagreement between these two organizations concerning an unsigned work in Picton Castle was at the centre of the second episode of the fourth season of the television series Fake or Fortune.
In 1919, Ambroise Vollard, a renowned art dealer, published a book on the life and work of Renoir, La Vie et l'Œuvre de Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in an edition of 1000 copies. In 1986, Vollard's heirs started reprinting the copper plates, generally, etchings with hand applied watercolor. These prints are signed by Renoir in the plate and are embossed "Vollard" in the lower margin. They are not numbered, dated or signed in pencil.
One of Renoir's paintings has sold for more than US$70 million. Bal du moulin de la Galette sold for $78.1 million May 17, 1990 at Sotheby's New York.[28]
In 2012, Renoir's Paysage Bords de Seine was offered for sale at auction but the painting was discovered to have been stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951. The sale was cancelled.
^ abcDistel, Anne. "Renoir, Auguste." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 27 December 2014.
^Wadley, Nicholas: Renoir, A Retrospective, page 15. Park Lane, 1989.
^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.
^Poulet, A. L., & Murphy, A. R. (1979). Corot to Braque: French Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, page 117. Boston: The Museum. ISBN0-87846-134-5.
^Rey, Robert: La Peinture française à la fin du XIXe siècle, la renaissance du sentiment classique : Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Les Beaux-Arts, Van Oest, 1931 (thesis).
Impressionism: a centenary exhibition, an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fully available online as PDF), which contains material on Renoir (p. 179–200)
Impressionism is a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, ordinary subject matter, inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s.
Musée d'Orsay
The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the Left Bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It houses the largest collection of impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces in the world, by painters including Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. It is one of the largest art museums in Europe. Musée d'Orsay had 3.177 million visitors in 2017.
Gustave Caillebotte
Gustave Caillebotte was a French painter, member and patron of the artists known as Impressionists, although he painted in a more realistic manner than many others in the group. Caillebotte was noted for his early interest in photography as an art form.
Bal du moulin de la Galette
Bal du moulin de la Galette is an 1876 painting by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is housed at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris and is one of Impressionism's most celebrated masterpieces. The painting depicts a typical Sunday afternoon at the original Moulin de la Galette in the district of Montmartre in Paris. In the late 19th century, working class Parisians would dress up and spend time there dancing, drinking, and eating galettes into the evening.
Musée Marmottan Monet
Musée Marmottan Monet is located at 2, rue Louis Boilly in the 16th arrondissement of Paris and features over three hundred Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings by Claude Monet. It is the largest collection of his works.
Georges Petit
Georges Petit was a French art dealer, a key figure in the Paris art world and an important promoter and cultivator of Impressionist artists.
Garden at Sainte-Adresse
The Garden at Sainte-Adresse is a painting by the French impressionist painter Claude Monet.. The painting was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art after an auction sale at Christie's in December 1967, under the French title La terrasse à Sainte-Adresse. The painting was exhibited at the 4th Impressionist exhibition, Paris, April 10–May 11, 1879, as no. 157 under the title Jardin à Sainte-Adresse.
Bain à la Grenouillère
Bain à la Grenouillère is a painting by the impressionist painter, Claude Monet.
Le Moulin de la Galette (Van Gogh series)
Le Moulin de la Galette is the title of several paintings made by Vincent van Gogh in 1886 of a windmill, the Moulin de la Galette, which was near Van Gogh and his brother Theo's apartment in Montmartre. The owners of the windmill maximized the view on the butte overlooking Paris, creating a terrace for viewing and a dance hall for entertainment.
Albert André
Albert André was a French Post-Impressionist figurative painter. He produced portraits of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, his closest friend, and Claude Monet.
The Swing (Pierre-Auguste Renoir)
The Swing is an oil on canvas painting by the French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir who was a leading exponent of the Impressionist style. The painting was executed in 1876. The painting measures 92 x 73 centimetres and is in the Musée d’Orsay. Renoir executed the painting in what are now the Musée de Montmartre gardens. He had rented a cottage in the gardens so that he be could closer to the Moulin de la Galette where he was engaged in painting Bal du moulin de la Galette.
La Parisienne (Renoir painting)
La Parisienne is an oil painting by the French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, completed in 1874 and now displayed at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff. The work, which was one of seven presented by Renoir at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, is often referred to as The Blue Lady and is one of the centre-pieces of the National Museum's art collection.
Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne
Skaters in the Bois de Boulogne is an oil-on-canvas landscape painting by the French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, created during the winter of 1868. The painting depicts a snowscape with a large number of Parisians, young and old, spending leisure time on a frozen park lake. Due to Renoir's strong dislike of cold temperatures and snow, the piece is one of his few winter landscapes.
Lise Tréhot
Lise Tréhot was a French art model who posed for artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir from 1866 until 1872, during his early Salon period. She appeared in more than twenty paintings, including notable works such as Lise (1867) and In Summer (1868), and she was the model for almost all of Renoir's work featuring female figures at this time. Tréhot married Georges Brière de l'Isle in 1883 and raised four children to whom she bequeathed two of Renoir's paintings, Lise Sewing (1867–68) and Lise With a White Shawl (1872), both of which are currently held by the Dallas Museum of Art.
Lise (Renoir)
Lise, also known as Lise with a Parasol, is an oil-on-canvas painting by the French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, created in 1867 during his early Salon period. The full-length painting depicts model Lise Tréhot posing in a forest. She wears a white muslin dress and holds a black lace parasol to shade her from the sunlight, which filters down through the leaves, contrasting her face in the shadow and her body in the light, highlighting her dress rather than her face. After having several paintings rejected by the Salon, Renoir's Lise was finally accepted and exhibited in May 1868.
Les Grandes Baigneuses (Renoir)
Les Grandes Baigneuses, or The Large Bathers, is a painting by Auguste Renoir made between 1884 and 1887. The painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia.
Blonde Bather
Auguste Renoir painted two very similar versions of Blonde Bather in 1881 and 1882 – both are now in private collections but on public display. The model was Aline Charigot, later to become Renoir's wife. Influenced by seeing renaissance painting in Italy in 1881, these pictures showed a marked change of style from Renoir's previous work. Some commentators consider these are works of great beauty, others that they are vulgar. There has been criticism of the conservation work performed on the 1881 painting.
Marguerite Charpentier
Marguerite Charpentier was a French salonist and art collector who was one of the earliest champions of the Impressionists, especially Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Victor Chocquet
Victor Chocquet was a French art collector and an ardent propagandist of Impressionism. As a senior editor at the Directorate-General of Customs and Indirect Taxes, he was present at all the exhibitions where he defended painters confronted with mockery and insults. His collection was huge. It was dispersed after his death in 1899. Many of the paintings are currently in American museums.
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