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 :. | Algerian Girl | Girl with Parasol (Aline Nunes) | The Test Garden in Algiers | Rocky Crags at L'Estaque | Snowy Landscape |
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Pars, William
English, 1742-82 English painter. He first established himself in London as a portrait painter, exhibiting at the Society of Artists in 1760 and at the Free Society of Artists from 1761. In 1764 he won the third premium of the Royal Society of Arts for his history painting depicting Caractacus before the Emperor Claudius (untraced). In the same year he was selected by the Dilettanti Society to accompany Richard Chandler and Nicholas Revett on an archaeological expedition to Asia Minor and Greece (1764-6). His views of Classical monuments in Asia Minor were engraved and published in Ionian Antiquities (1769), while those he made in Greece, which included pioneering drawings of the Parthenon sculptures, were used in the second volume of James Stuart's Antiquities of Athens (1777).
Jose del Castillo
1737-1793 Spanish Jose del Castillo Location a Spanish painter and a leader of the artistic movement Illustrious Absolutism. Many of his paintings were done on tapestries. Castillo made many attempts to become Royal Painter for the Spanish monarchy, but he was never successful. This was not due to a lack of talent, but rather because Castillo allied himself with the wrong noble. His patron, the Earl of Floridablanca, feuded bitterly with the Earl of Aranda. The Earl of Aranda was favored by King Carlos III, and as a result, Ram??n Bayeu (Aranda favorite painter) became Royal Painter. After Carlos III died, Castillo tried again to become Royal Painter. Unfortunately, the new monarch, Carlos IV, decided to leave the position of Royal Painter vacant.
John Lavery
1856-1941 Sir John Lavery (20 March 1856 ?C 10 January 1941) was an Irish painter best known for his portraits. Belfast-born John Lavery attended the Haldane Academy in Glasgow, Scotland, in the 1870s and the Acad??mie Julian in Paris in the early 1880s. He returned to Glasgow and was associated with the "Glasgow School". In 1888 he was commissioned to paint the state visit of Queen Victoria to the Glasgow International Exhibition. This launched his career as a society painter and he moved to London soon after. In London he became friendly with James McNeill Whistler and was clearly influenced by him. Like William Orpen, Lavery was appointed an official artist in the First World War. Ill-health, however, prevented him from travelling to the Western Front. A serious car crash during a Zeppelin bombing raid also kept him from fulfilling this role as war artist. He remained in Britain and mostly painted boats, planes and airships. During the war years he was a close friend of the Asquith family and spent time with them at their Sutton Courtenay Thames-side residence, painting their portraits and idyllic pictures like Summer on the River (Hugh Lane Gallery). After the war he was knighted and in 1921 he was elected to the Royal Academy. During this time, he and his wife both became interested in their Irish heritage and were tangentially involved in both the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War: they gave the use of their London home to the Irish negotiators during the Treaty negotiations. After Michael Collins was killed, Lavery painted Michael Collins, Love of Ireland, now in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery. In 1929 John Lavery made substantial donations of his work to both The Ulster Museum and the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery and in the 1930s he returned to Ireland. He received honorary degrees from the University of Dublin and Queen's University of Belfast. He was also made a free man of both Dublin and Belfast. He died in County Kilkenny, aged 84, from natural causes. He was buried in Putney Vale Cemetery.