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 :. | Portrait of Claude Monet | Madame Renoir and Bob | Woman in Black | Les Grands Boulevards | Madame Paul Berard |
Related Artists:
Pawel Andrejewitsch Fedotow
painted Junge Witwe in 1851
Joannes Fijt
(15 March 1611 - 11 September 1661) was a Flemish Baroque animal painter and etcher. Fyt was born in Antwerp, where he was baptized on 15 June 1611, he was registered in 1621 as apprentice to Hans van den Berghe, who was a restorer of old pictures rather than a painter of new ones. Fyt then trained with Frans Snyders between about 1629-31, during which time, at the age of twenty, he entered the guild of St Luke as a master. From then until his death in 1661, he produced a vast number of paintings in which the bold facility of Frans Snyders is united to the powerful effects of Rembrandt, and harmonies of gorgeous tone are not less conspicuous than freedom of touch and a true semblance of nature. He left Antwerp for Paris in 1633, travelling on to Italy the following year, where he worked in Venice and probably visited Rome (as he later joined the Guild of Romanists back in Antwerp). By 1641 he was back in Antwerp, where he married in 1654. Hunting trophiesFyt excelled in the rendering of animal life in its most varied forms. He may have been less correct in outline, less bold in action than Snyders, but he was much more skilful and more true in the reproduction of the coat of deer, dogs, greyhounds, hares and monkeys, whilst in realizing the plumage of peacocks, woodcocks, ducks, hawks, and cocks and hens, he had no equal, nor was any artist even of the Dutch school more effective in relieving his compositions with accessories of tinted cloth, porcelain ware, vases and fruit. He was not clever at figures, and he sometimes trusted for these to the co-operation of Cornelius Schut or Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, whilst his architectural backgrounds were sometimes executed by Quellyn. Silenus amongst Fruit and Flowers, in the Harrach collection at Vienna, Diana and her Nymphs with the Produce of the Chase, in the Belvedere at Vienna, and Dead Game and Fruit in front of a Triumphal Arch, belonging to Baron von Rothschild at Vienna, are specimens of the co-operation respectively of Schut, Willeborts and Quellyn. They are also Fyt's masterpieces. The earliest dated work of the master is a cat grabbing at a piece of dead poultry near a hare and birds, belonging to Baron Cetto at Munich, and executed in 1644. The latest is a Dead Snipe with Ducks, of 1660, sold with the Jäger collection at Cologne in 1871. Great power is shown in the bear and boar hunts at Munich and Ravensworth castle. A Hunted Roedeer with Dogs in the Water, in the Berlin Museum, has some of the life and more of the roughness of Snyders, but lacks variety of tint and finish. A splendid specimen is the Page and Parrot near a table covered with game, guarded by a dog staring at a monkey, in the Wallace collection. With the needle and the brush Fyt was equally clever. He etched 16 plates, and those representing dogs are of their kind unique.
LOO, Louis Michel van
French painter (b. 1707, Toulon, d. 1771, Paris). Painter, son of Jean-Baptiste van Loo. He trained with his father in Turin and Rome, later attending the courses of the Academie Royale in Paris. He received the institution's first prize for painting in 1726, and in 1728, accompanied by his brother, Francois, and his uncle, Carle, returned to Rome where he was associated with Francois Boucher. On his way back to France, he stayed for a time in Turin, painting portraits of the royal family of Sardinia, the Duke and Duchess of Savoy. In Paris he was admitted to membership of the Academie Royale and in 1735 was appointed assistant teacher at the Academie, becoming renowned as a specialist in portrait painting. Most of his portraits from this period are half-length, combining ideas from Hyacinthe Rigaud's later work with other more natural and innovative ones. On the death of Jean Ranc, Philip V of Spain asked Rigaud to suggest a substitute, and van Loo was proposed. He arrived in Madrid in 1737 and remained there as Pintor de la Corte until 1752, responding with modern aesthetic ideas to the demands of the Spanish monarchs for pomp and splendour. He carried out court commissions but devoted part of his time to teaching, his pupils often becoming studio assistants. He also took an active part in meetings held over a number of years to establish the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Fernando, for which he produced the canvas, the Education of Cupid by Venus and Mercury