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Pierre-Auguste Renoir (/ rɛnˈwɑːr /; [1] 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.
Learn about the life and work of Renoir, one of the leading Impressionist painters. See his paintings of landscapes, figures and portraits, and how he was influenced by other artists and travelled abroad.
- Overview
- Early years
- Association with the Impressionists
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (born February 25, 1841, Limoges, France—died December 3, 1919, Cagnes) French painter originally associated with the Impressionist movement. His early works 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 discip...
Renoir was born into a family of artisans. His father, a tailor who had seven children, moved with his family to Paris about 1845. Renoir demonstrated his gift at an early age. Quickly recognizing his talent, his parents apprenticed him, at age 13, to work in a porcelain factory, where he learned to decorate plates with bouquets of flowers. Shortly after that, he was painting fans and then cloth panels representing religious themes for missionaries to hang in their churches. His skill and the great pleasure he took in his work soon convinced him he should study painting in earnest. Having saved a little money, he decided, in 1862, to take evening courses in drawing and anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts as well as painting lessons at the studio of Charles Gleyre, a Swiss painter who had been a student of the 19th-century Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominque Ingres. Although the academic style of his teacher did not suit Renoir, he nevertheless accepted its discipline in order to acquire the elementary skills needed to become a painter.
Renoir felt a much greater affinity with three students who entered the studio a few months later: Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, and Frédéric Bazille. All four students dreamed of an art that was closer to life and free from past traditions. The shared ideals of the four young men quickly led to a strong friendship, and Renoir’s early works include Frédéric Bazille (1867), The Painter Sisley and His Wife (1868), and Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil (1873). At the same time in another workshop at the Académie Suisse, the young artists Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro were preoccupied with the same problems as Renoir and his friends. With Bazille as the intermediary, the two groups met frequently.
Circumstances encouraged Renoir to attempt a new freedom and experimentation in his style. The convention of the time was that a painting—even a landscape—had to be executed in the studio. In the spring of 1864, however, Gleyre’s four students moved temporarily to the forest of Fontainebleau, where they devoted themselves to painting directly from nature. The Fontainebleau forest had earlier attracted other artists, among them Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet, who insisted that art represent the reality of everyday life, even though they had not yet completely renounced the constraints imposed by traditional training. In 1863 Édouard Manet took a much bolder step: his picture Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863; Luncheon on the Grass) provoked a violent scandal because its subject and technique stressed the observation of modern reality over the repetition of a traditional ideal. Manet’s daring made him, in the eyes of these young artists, the leader of a new movement.
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Artists, Painters, & Architects
Conditions were ripe for the birth of a new pictorial language, and Impressionism, bursting upon the scene, attracted notoriety with the first Impressionist exposition of 1874, held independently of the official Salon. It took 10 years for the movement to acquire its definitive form, its independent vision, and its unique perceptiveness. But one can point to 1874 as the year of departure for the movement that subsequently spawned modern art.
Renoir’s work is a perfect illustration of this new approach in thought and technique. By using small, multicoloured strokes, he evoked the vibration of the atmosphere, the sparkling effect of foliage, and especially the luminosity of a young woman’s skin in the outdoors. Renoir and his companions stubbornly strove to produce light-suffused paintings from which black was excluded, but their pursuits led to many disappointments: their paintings, so divergent from traditional formulas, were frequently rejected by the juries of the Salon and were extremely difficult to sell. Despite the continuing criticism, some of the Impressionists were making themselves known, as much among art critics as among the lay public. Renoir, because of his fascination with the human figure, was distinctive among the others, who were more interested in landscape. Thus, he obtained several orders for portraits and was introduced, thanks to the publisher Georges Charpentier, to upper-middle-class society, from whom he obtained commissions for portraits, most notably of women and children.
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Feb 25, 2015 · Learn about the life and art of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a French Impressionist painter who captured the beauty and movement of light and nature. Explore his famous works, such as Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, and his influence on modernism.
- French
- February 25, 1841
- Limoges, France
- December 3, 1919
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, commonly known as Auguste Renoir (US: /rɛnˈwɑːr/ or UK: /ˈrɛnwɑːr/; 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.
- French
- February 25, 1841
- Limoges, France
- December 3, 1919
Apr 2, 2014 · An innovative artist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir started out as an apprentice to a porcelain painter and studied drawing in his free time. After years as a struggling painter, Renoir helped launch...
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir (; 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.
