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 :. | Environs de Cagnes | Young Girls Reading | Girl with Parasol (Aline Nunes) | The Road from Trouville to Honfleur as it looks now | The Duck Pond |
Related Artists:
Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen
(also Cornelius Jonson van Ceulen, Cornelius Johnson, Cornelis Jansz. van Ceulen and many other variants)(bapt. October 14, 1593, London - bur. August 5, 1661, Utrecht) was an English painter of portraits of Dutch or Flemish parentage. He has been described as "one of the most gifted and prolific portrait painters practising in England during the 1620s and 1630s". Janssens van Ceulen was born to Dutch or Flemish parents in London - his father had been a refugee from Antwerp, and the family had originated in Cologne. He was baptised at the Dutch church at Austin Friars, the son of Johanna le Grand and Cornelius Johnson. He may have been trained in the Netherlands, and was certainly influenced by other artists from the Netherlands, but he was active in England, at least from 1618 to 1643. In the 1620s, he lived and had his studio in Blackfriars, London, as did Anthony van Dyck; it was just outside the boundaries of the City of London, and so avoided the monopoly in the City of members of the London painters' Guild. He married Elizabeth Beke of Colchester in 1622. Janssens' son (Cornelius Janssens, junior) was born in 1634. He was also a painter. Janssens' daughter was married to Nicholas Russell of Bruges. Janssens moved to Canterbury in the mid 1630s, living with Sir Arnold Braems, a Flemish merchant. Janssens continued to live in England until after the outbreak of the English Civil War, but in October 1643, apparently at the insistence of his wife, he moved to Middelburg, and between 1646 and 1652 he lived in Amsterdam, before settling in Utrecht, where he was buried.
Francis Davis Millet
(November 3, 1846 - April 15, 1912) was an American painter, sculptor, and writer who died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912. Francis Davis Millet was born in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. At age sixteen, Millet entered the Massachusetts regiment, first as a drummer boy and then a surgical assistant in the American Civil War. He repeatedly pointed to his experience working for his father as giving him an appreciation for the vivid blood red that he repeatedly used in his early paintings.
Peter Severin Kroyer
Norwegian-born Danish Painter, 1851-1909