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 :. | Summer(The Gypsy Girl) | The Artist's Family | Claude Monet Reading | Young Girl with a Swan | Girl with Parasol (Aline Nunes) |
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Charles landseer,R.A.
1799-1879 Painter, brother of Thomas Landseer. He trained initially with his father John Landseer, then under Benjamin Robert Haydon, and in 1816 he attended the Royal Academy Schools in London. In 1823 he accompanied Sir Charles Stuart de Rothesay (1779-1845) aboard HMS Wellesley on a voyage to Portugal and then to Brazil, in order to negotiate a commercial treaty with Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil (reg 1822-31). Many of the drawings he made on this trip were exhibited in 1828 at the British Institution, and in that year he sent his first painting to the Royal Academy. This was Dorothea, illustrating a scene from Cervantes's Don Quixote. He continued to exhibit at the Academy until his death, showing mostly romanticized history paintings or such literary subjects as Clarissa Harlowe in the Sponging House from Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa (London, 1748). The English Civil War (1642-51) was of particular interest to him, his devotion to such historical subjects perhaps being attributable to the influence of his years with Haydon. He also painted portraits, genre scenes and animal studies . In 1837 he was elected ARA and in 1845 RA. In 1851, probably due to the influence of his brother Edwin, he succeeded George Jones as Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools. Responsible for instructing the antique class, his tenure was criticized both for the way his position had been obtained and for the deficiency of his teaching, and he retired from the Keepership in 1873 on full salary.
Charles Sprague Pearce
For other people named Charles Pearce, see Charles Pearce (disambiguation). Charles Sprague Pearce (October 13, 1851 - May 18, 1914) was an American artist.
David Rijckaert
David Ryckaert III, sometimes called The Younger (2 December 1612 (baptised) - 11 November 1661) was a Flemish painter. A member of the Ryckaert family of artists, he was born and raised in Antwerp, the city in which he conducted his career and in which he died. He was the son of David Ryckaert II, grandson of David Ryckaert I, and nephew of Martin Ryckaert. David Ryckaert was a pupil of his homonymous father; his work was influenced by the styles of Adriaen Brouwer and both David Teniers the Elder and David Teniers the Younger. Ryckaert is noted for large and often humorous genre pictures of farmers and landlords, and powerfully coloured still lifes. He also painted a range of other subjects, including religious pictures; his The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1650) is in the collection of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.