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 :. | Bathers | Mixed Flowers in an Earthenware Pot | Aline and Pierre | Three Bathers with a Crab | Les Grands Boulevards |
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Giovanni Francesco Guercino
1591-1666 Italian Giovanni Francesco Guercino Galleries
PANNINI, Giovanni Paolo
Italian Neoclassical Painter, ca.1691-1765 was an Italian painter and architect, mainly known as one of the vedutisti or (veduta, or "view painters"). As a young man, Pannini trained in his native town of Piacenza as a stage designer. In 1711, he moved to Rome, where he studied drawing with Benedetto Luti and became famous as a decorator of palaces, including the Villa Patrizi (1718C1725) and the Palazzo de Carolis (1720). As a painter, Pannini is best known for his vistas of Rome, in which he took a particular interest in the city's antiquities. Among his most famous works are the interior of the Pantheon, and his vedute paintings of picture galleries containing views of Rome. Most of his works, specially those of ruins have a substantial fanciful and unreal embellishment characteristic of capriccio themes. In 1719, Pannini was admitted to the Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. He taught in Rome at the Accademia di San Luca and the Academie de France, where he influenced Jean-Honore Fragonard. His studio included Hubert Robert and his son Francesco Panini. His style would influence a number of other vedutisti, such as his pupil Antonio Joli, as well as Canaletto and Bernardo Bellotto,
Laurits Andersen Ring
Danish, 1854-1933 Laurits Andersen Ring (1854-1933) was one of the foremost painters of Danish symbolism. He was born as Laurits Andersen in the village Ring in southern Zealand. In 1881 he the took the name of his birth place, and was since known as L.A. Ring. For a while, he lived at Baldersbronde near Hedehusene in the old school building, which was later to be the home of another painter, Ludvig Find. Ring has produced several paintings from these towns. As a painter, he never distanced himself from his humble origin, but rather made it his dominant theme. Most of his paintings depict the village life and landscapes of southern Zealand from Præsto to Nestved. There are several examples of his work at practically every Danish art museum including the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen. He was married on July 25, 1896 to fellow painter Sigrid Kahler, who was the daughter of ceramic artist Herman Kahler.