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 :. | Nude in an Armchair | Jeanne Samary | Dance in the Town | The Test Garden in Algiers | The Lesson |
Related Artists:
George Landseer
b.1833 Succ c.1844 r.1852-1886
Tom Mostyn
British 1864-1930
Cordelia Creigh Wilson
(28 November 1873, Georgetown, Colorado - 7 June 1953, Seattle, Washington) was a painter noted for her landscapes of New Mexico and the American Southwest. Cordelia "Cordie" Creigh was born in Clear Creek County, Colorado. Her father died in her early childhood, and she was raised by her mother, Emma Creigh who shuttled the family between Winfield, Kansas and Colorado. She married Willard Wilkinson in Boulder, Colorado in 1897 and gave birth to her only child, Louise, in Hayden the next year, however, the couple divorced shortly after the turn of the century. Cordelia then began to seriously develop her skills as an artist motivated by latest trends in American realism led by Robert Henri. Her academic training emphasized development of an alla prima technique and painting out of doors, which inspired her to produce bold impasto works quickly. She started making road trips to New Mexico and became friends with painters in the Taos Society of Artists and the Santa Fe art colony. Her numerous expressive oil sketches and en plein air canvases of adobe dwellings and rugged landscapes caught the attention of art dealers. Before the end of the First World War, Cordelia married John H. Wilson and took his surname for her entire professional career. They settled on Tremont Street in Denver, just around the corner from the J. Gibson Smith Gallery which displayed and sold her works. Many of her paintings had frames she hand-carved in rustic Arts and Crafts style and gilded with sheets of gold leaf. In 1917, Cordelia Wilson was honored by having two paintings selected for the inaugural exhibition of the new New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. The show featured easel works by George Bellows, Robert Henri, F. Martin Hennings, and Leon Kroll, who were working in the Southwest at that time, along with the "Taos Six" (Oscar Berninghaus, Ernest Blumenschein, Irving Couse, Herbert Dunton, Bert Geer Phillips, and Joseph Henry Sharp) and other members of the Taos Society. One of her paintings exhibited in the show, A Mexican Home, was reproduced in the January CFebruary 1918 issue of the journal Art and Archaeology (published by the Archaeological Institute of America) that featured a cover article about the museum's opening. Among Cordelia Wilson's largest landscapes is a 50" x 70" canvas, created for World War I military training. It was exhibited at the School of American Research of Santa Fe in 1917 with other large-scale so-called "Range Finder" paintings by Blumenschein, Berninghaus, Phillips, Gustave Baumann, Walter Ufer, Leon Gaspard, and others. They had been commissioned by the U.S. Army based on a proposal by the Salmagundi Club of New York, whose members wanted to make a special contribution to America's war effort. When the show closed, the works on display were shipped to Camp Funston at Fort Riley, Kansas and Camp Cody at Deming, New Mexico. The paintings were used for indoor instruction in range finding, topographical quizzes, and map drawing at Army camps. John Wilson, her husband, contracted tuberculosis in about 1921. The couple moved to the Seattle for his treatment at a sanitorium, where he passed away the following year. In 1923, Cordelia married for a third time to John N. Fahnestock, but this marriage ended in divorce in 1928. Cordelia continued to reside in Pacific Northwest producing still lifes, florals, and scenes of the Puget Sound region, although she periodically traveled, worked, and displayed her art in the Southwest.