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 :. | The Braid(suzanne Vdaladon) | The Pone des Arts and the Institut de Frane | The Promenade | On the Terrace | Ambrois Vollard |
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Jan miel
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1599-1664 Flemish painter, active in Italy. Miel must have arrived in Rome in the early 1630s; he immediately came under the influence of Pieter van Laer (il Bamboccio) and the BAMBOCCIANTI. His earliest paintings of bambocciate (low-life scenes) are the Bowls Players (1633; Paris, Louvre) and its companion piece The Cobbler (Besan?on, Mus. B.-A. & Arch?ol.). Shortly after his arrival in Rome, Miel joined the Schildersbent, a confraternity of Netherlandish artists, and was given the nickname 'Bieco' ('threatening look'). His presence in Rome is documented from 1636 to 1658, when he moved to Turin and entered the service of Charles-Emanuel II, Duke of Savoy. Other early paintings that can be attributed to the 1630s include Halt at the Inn (Marseille, Mus. B.-A.) and Hunters' Rest (Warsaw, N. Mus.). Both are reworkings, in their subject-matter and composition, of contemporary paintings by van Laer, such as his Hunters Resting (Florence, Uffizi) and Halt at the Inn (Paris, Louvre).
Prospero Fontana
(1512 - 1597) was an Italian painter of the late Renaissance. Fontana was born in Bologna, and became a pupil of Innocenzo da Imola. He afterwards worked for Perin del Vaga in the Palazzo Doria in Genoa. Towards 1550, it is reported that Michelangelo introduced him to Pope Julius III as a portrait-painter; and he was pensioned at the pontifical court. He later joined Vasari's studio in Florence, and worked in frescoes at the Palazzo Vecchio (1563-65). He is an early representative of the Bolognese school of painting. Sabbatini, Sammachini and Passerotti were three of his principal pupils or colleagues. His daughter, Lavinia Fontana, was also a prominent painter of mostly conventional religious canvases. Returning to Bologna, after doing some work in Fontainebleau (France) and in Genoa, he opened a school of art, in which he became briefly the preceptor of Lodovico and Agostino Carracci. He has left a large quantity of work in Bologna. His altarpiece of the Adoration of the Magi, in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, being considered his masterpiece. It is not unlike the style of Paul Veronese. He died in Rome in 1597.
Eugene Isabey
1803-1886 French Eugene Isabey Galleries Born in Paris, the son of Jean-Baptiste Isabey, a painter as well, Eug??ne Isabey studied and worked at the Louvre Museum. Early in his career his paintings consisted of mostly watercolor landscapes. In 1820, he travelled to Normandy and Britain painting land and seascapes. Isabey journeyed with the French Expedition to Algiers in 1830 as an illustrator. Yet, the trip's paintings sold poorly on the market and encouraged him to switch to narrative and historical painting. He was later selected to become one of Louis-Philippe??s court painters.