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 :. | Female Semi-Nude | Young Girl Reading | Rose et Bleue | The Vintagers | Richard Wagner January 15 |
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James Smetham
1821-1889 was an English Pre-Raphaelite painter and engraver, a follower of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.[1] Smetham was born in Pateley Bridge, Yorkshire, and attended school in Leeds; he was originally apprenticed to an architect before deciding on an artistic career. He studied at the Royal Academy, beginning in 1843. His modest early success as a portrait painter was stifled by the development of photography (a problem shared by other artists of the time). In 1851 Smetham took a teaching position att the Wesleyan Normal College in Westminster; in 1854 he married Sarah Goble, a fellow teacher at the school. They would eventually have six children. Smetham worked in a range of genres, including religious and literary themes as well as portraiture; but he is perhaps best known as a landscape painter. His "landscapes have a visionary quality" reminiscent of the work of William Blake, John Linnell, and Samuel Palmer.[2] Out of a lifetime output of some 430 paintings and 50 etchings, woodcuts, and book illustrations, his 1856 painting The Dream is perhaps his best-known work. He was also an essayist and art critic; an article on Blake (in the form of a review of Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake), which appeared in the January 1869 issue of the Quarterly Review,[3] influenced and advanced recognition of Blake's artistic importance. Other Smetham articles for the Review were "Religious Art in England" (1861), "The Life and Times of Sir Joshua Reynolds" (1866), and "Alexander Smith" (1868). He also wrote some poetry. Smetham was a devout Methodist, and after a mental breakdown in 1857, the second half of his life was marked by a growing religious mania and eventual insanity. "In one of his notebooks he attempted to illustrate every verse in the Bible."[4] (Smetham habitually created miniature, postage-stamp-sized pen-and-ink drawings, in a process he called "squaring." He produced thousands of these in his lifetime.) He suffered a final breakdown in 1877 and lived in seclusion until his death. Smetham's letters, posthumously published by his widow,[5] throw light upon Rossetti, John Ruskin, and other contemporaries, and have been praised for their literary and spiritual qualities.
John Charles Dollman
British, 1851-1934, He was an English painter and illustrator. Dollman was born in Hove on 6 May 1851 and moved to London to study at South Kensington and the Royal Academy Schools, after which he set up a studio at Bedford Park, London. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1870 to 1912, and was elected RWS (Member of the Royal Watercolour Society) in 1913. Dollman was also an illustrator, working in black and white or colour for magazines such as the Graphic during and after the 1880s. Some of his early work has been said to have influenced Van Gogh . A central theme was ambitious mythological pictures such as a Viking Foray, a Viking horde entitled the Ravagers, The Unknown (1912), featuring a girl surrounded by chimps and Orpheus and his Lute with Lions. He also produced bold compositions of animals and people such as Robinson Crusoe and His Man Friday, Polo and Mowgli made leader of the Bandar-log (1903) . His best known work is possibly A London Cab Stand (1888) , focussing on a group of horses in a stormy scene . He composed at least three variants of this picture, and there are other instances where he made copies or near-copies of individual pictures. In the 1890s he painted pictures of soldiers, and some less well regarded genre pictures of people with animals. He also painted wild animal pictures without attempting any narrative content . Dollman's works are in the collections of various galleries. The Immigrants' Ship (1884) is in the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide . 'The Ravager' is owned by the Trustees of the Royal Watercolour Society, London, [8]. A version of The Unknown is in the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle. A London Cab Stand is in the London Museum. A Dog's Home, Table d'Hote (1879) is in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool , and During the Time of the Sermonses (1896), an odd picture of a pair of religious people approaching two golfers, is in the collection of the Harris Museum, Preston , while 'Famine' (1904) is at the Salford Museum and Art Gallery Dollman died on 11 December 1934, aged 83.
Carles Arthur Beecher
American Modernist Painter, 1882-1952 was an American Modernist painter. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1900 and 1907. He studied with Thomas Pollock Anshutz, Hugh Breckenridge, Henry McCarter, Cecilia Beaux, and William Merritt Chase. In 1907 he traveled to France where he remained until 1910. In France, he greatly admired the works of Cezanne and Matisse, and became close friends with John Marin and Eduard Steichen. He displayed six landscapes in the Salon d'Automne of 1908.