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 :. | Boating Party at Chatou | View of Bordighera:the Palms Postcard | Odalisque or Woman of Algiers | Portrait of Jeanne Samary | The Pont des Arts |
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J. Alden Weir
(August 30, 1852 - December 8, 1919) was an American impressionist painter and member of the Cos Cob Art Colony near Greenwich, Connecticut. Weir was also one of the founding members of "The Ten", a loosely-allied group of American artists dissatisfied with professional art organizations, who banded together in 1898 to exhibit their works as a stylistically unified group.
Gustavus Hesselius
(1682 - May 25, 1755) was a Swedish born painter who emigrated to the New World in 1711. He was the father of painter John Hesselius and cousin of the religious leader Emanuel Swedenborg. Hesselius left his home country of Sweden for Wilmington, Delaware in 1711. There he lived until 1717 when he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he lived until 1721. In 1721, he moved to Prince George's County, Maryland and became a portrait painter, though he had been trained in Sweden. That same year, he received the first recorded public art commission in the American colonies, he painted The Last Supper. He also painted a Crucifixion. Some time around 1735, Hesselius returned to Philadelphia where spent the rest of his life and traveling. He was listed as a member of the Gloria Dei (Old Swedes') Church in Philadelphia. He also worked as an organ builder, having built an organ for the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1746. From about this time on, he focused on building organs, referring painting commissions to his son John. J. Hall Pleasants has said that Hesselius became "America's earliest portrait painter of note." In 1994 he was named to the Prince George's County Hall of Fame.
oscar bjorck
född 15 januari 1860 i Stockholm, död av en hjärtattack i sitt hem klockan 03.00 den 5 december 1929, var en svensk konstnär och professor vid Konsthögskolan 1898-1925, och från 1918 även vice preses. Åren 1877-1882 var han elev till Edvard Pers??us vid konstakademins principskola och målade bland annat prisämnena Loke fängslas af asarne (1880), Gustaf Vasa inför kung Hans (1881) och Den förlorade sonens återkomst (1882, belönad med kungliga medaljen). 1883 fick Björck akademiskt resestipendium och vistades vintern 1883?C84 i Paris. Vintern 1884?C85 reste Björck till M??nchen, målade några porträtt, bland annat ett i helfigur av sin hustru. Våren 1885 flyttade han till Venezia och på hösten till Rom. Där målade han den stora modelltavlan Susanna (Göteborgs museum) och Romerska smeder (galleriet i Washington, en skiss till samma tavla finns i Göteborgs museum). 1887 målades i Venezia Veneziansk saluhall (nationalmuseum), Lördagsmässa i Markuskyrkan och andra tavlor. Efter en sommarvistelse på Skagen, där han förut tillbringat två somrar, 1882 och 1884, bosatte sig Björck 1888 i Stockholm. Han har sedan huvudsakligast målat porträtt. Bland dessa kan nämnas flera av konung Oscar (bland dem ett på Skokloster, ett i helfigur på Drottningholm, ett med krona och mantel, på Stockholms slott, ett som övergick i tyske kejsarens ägo), prins Eugen vid staffliet (nationalmuseum, 1895), kronprins Gustaf (Stockholms slott, 1900), konstnärens hustru (helfigur, 1891, Göteborgs museum) och friherre Nordenfalk (konstakademien, 1892). Dessutom skapade han några landskap, ett par genrebilder och olika dekorativa målningar. Från 1889 var han ledamot vid konstakademin och lärare vid Konsthögskolan. 1898 blev han professor. Björck var kommissarie för konstavdelningen vid Stockholmsutställningen 1897 och vid Baltiska utställningen 1914 samt för den svenska utställningen i London 1924.