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 :. | Terrace in Cagnes | The Bridge at Argenteuil in Autunn | Vicor Chocquet | The Spring | By the Seashore |
Related Artists:
DROST, Willem
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1630-1680 Dutch painter, draughtsman and printmaker, possibly of German origin. According to Houbraken, he was a pupil of Rembrandt, possibly in or shortly before 1650. An early etching signed w drost 1652 is probably a self-portrait, in which Drost portrayed himself as a young man drawing. His earliest dated paintings are two pendants of 1653: the Portrait of a Man (New York, Met.) and the Portrait of a Woman (The Hague, Mus. Bredius). The man's portrait is signed Wilhelmus Drost F. Amsterdam 1653
MANDER, Karel van
b. 1548, Meulebeke, d. 1606, Amsterdam Dutch painter, poet, and writer. Born of a noble family, after much wandering he settled in Haarlem in 1583 and founded a successful academy of painting with Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz (1562 C 1638). He is best known for The Book of Painters (1604), which contains about 175 biographies of Dutch, Flemish, and German painters of the 15th C 16th centuries; it became for the northern countries what Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters had been for Italy.
Theodoros Vryzakis
Thebes 19 October 1814 - Munich 6 December 1878) was a major Greek painter of the 19th century. Vryzakis's father died in the Greek War of Independence. He is the first Greek painter who studied in Munich and the main representative of the type of historical painting that was popular in Greece in the 18th century. He is considered the first painter of modern Greece, a recorder of the Greek War of Independence, which he viewed in a romantic and nostalgic way. His paintings' characters are pompous, theatrical and detached figures. His interest in the traditional costumes and the decoration and the absence of any individual facial expression is according to art critics the result of the eye of a "foreign" artist, who looks for the conventional element in another land. The monumental size of his pictures, the ceremonial and theatrical compositions, and the meticulous style of academic idealistic romanticism make his style unique for among Greek Artists. Today, many of his works are exhibited at the National Gallery of Athens and the Benaki Museum in Athens.