French Impressionist Painter, 1841-1919 Pierre-Auguste Renoir (February 25, 1841?CDecember 3, 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau". 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. His initial paintings show the influence of the colorism of Eugene Delacroix and the luminosity of Camille Corot. He also admired the realism of Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, and his early work resembles theirs in his use of black as a color. As well, Renoir admired Edgar Degas' sense of movement. Another painter Renoir greatly admired was the 18th century master François Boucher. 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 still a 'student' piece, already Renoir's heightened personal response to female sensuality is present. The model was Lise Tr??hot, then the artist's mistress and inspiration for a number of paintings. In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air (in the open air), 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. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet, working side-by-side, depicted the same scenes (La Grenouill??re, 1869). One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Le Bal au 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. On the Terrace, oil on canvas, 1881, Art Institute of ChicagoThe works of his early maturity 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 disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women, such as The Bathers, which was created during 1884-87. 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. This is sometimes called his "Ingres period", as he concentrated on his drawing and emphasized the outlines of figures. After 1890, however, he changed direction again, returning to the use of thinly brushed color which dissolved outlines as in his earlier work. From this period onward he concentrated especially on monumental nudes and domestic scenes, fine examples of which are Girls at the Piano, 1892, and Grandes Baigneuses, 1918-19. The latter painting is the most typical and successful of Renoir's late, abundantly fleshed nudes. A prolific artist, he made 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..  Related Paintings of Pierre Renoir :. | Bather Standing | Madame Renoirand Bob | Children on the Seashore, Guernsey | The Fisherman | The Little Fisher Girl(Marthe Berard) |
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Joseph Severn
(7 December 1793 - 3 August 1879) was an English portrait and subject painter and a personal friend of the famous English poet John Keats. He exhibited portraits, Italian genre, literary and biblical subjects, and a selection of his paintings can today be found in some of the most important museums in London, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Britain. The eldest son of a music teacher, Severn was born at Hoxton, near London, and apprenticed at the age of 14 to William Bond, an engraver. Severn was one of seven children; two of his brothers, Thomas (1801-1881) and Charles (1806-1894), became professional musicians, and Severn himself was an adroit pianist. During his early years he practised portraiture as a miniaturist.
BREKELENKAM, Quiringh van
Dutch painter (active c. 1647-1669 in Leiden) Dutch painter. He probably trained in Leiden, possibly under Gerrit Dou. In 1648, with several other painters, he founded the Guild of St Luke in Leiden. He married for the first time in 1648 and again in 1656, a year after his first wife's death. In 1649 his sister Aeltge married the painter Johannes Oudenrogge (1622-53), and the couple soon moved to Haarlem while the Brekelenkam family remained in Leiden. About 1656 Brekelenkam apparently acquired a licence to sell beer and brandy, perhaps because his income as a painter was insufficient to support his large family (six children from his first marriage and three from his second). He continued to be active as an artist and paid his guild dues fairly regularly. The last dues were paid in 1667, and his last dated painting, the Portrait of a Man Aged 33, is from 1669.
John Cecil Clay
Illustrator and genre, caricature painter American 1875-1930 American illustrator known for genre and caricature paintings. Clay was born in Ronceverte, West Virginia to an long-time Southern family. He was a student of Henry Siddons Mowbray at the Art Students League of New York and had a graphic style that was suited to illustration. A reoccurring subject was pretty young women. During his life he worked for Life and Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly. He was a member of Society of Illustrators and was represented at the St. Louis Exposition-World's Fair 1904. Apart from the above mentioned magazines he also worked as an illustrator for The Century Magazine, Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping.