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 :. | Lady Sewing | Monet Painting in his Garden | La Loge | The Beach at Guernsey | Coco Painting |
Related Artists:
Samuel Butler
British author , (1835 - 1902) Samuel Butler was born on Dec. 4, 1835, in Langar, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, the son of the local vicar. In a time of common paternal absolutism, his childhood seems to have been bleak and graceless. After taking a degree at Cambridge, he came into open conflict with his father over the question of his future profession, and at last he emigrated to New Zealand to become a sheep farmer. But though free of his father, he was not free of revolt, and the spirit of resentful rebelliousness marked much of his later life. In New Zealand he read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and wrote a series of newspaper articles setting forth Darwin's ideas and ingeniously applying the evolutionary hypothesis to machines. Having made a modest fortune, he returned to England in 1864. Erewhon (1872), Butler's first book, is a mixture of satire, utopian theories, and serious speculation masked as whimsy. Set in the frame of a trip to an unknown land (Erewhon is an anagram of "no-where"), it has no real plot but is rather a description and discussion of the customs and institutions of Erewhon. In this land moral failings are treated as mental illness and cured by a "straightener," but physical illness and misfortune are considered crimes and severely punished. Children sign certificates absolving their parents of responsibility for their birth, and education is carried on in the College of Unreason. Butler's reflections on orthodox religion, begun in New Zealand, issued in The Fair Haven (1873), an ironic attempt to reconcile the New Testament with rationalistic criticism. In Life and Habit he returned to the question of evolution. In Evolution Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck, or Cunning? (1887), he developed his ideas with an increasingly self-righteous resentment of what he conceived to be the Darwinians' deliberate concealment of the truth. Butler hoped to be able to restore will, intelligence, and design to a universe apparently made meaningless by the blind process of natural selection. The novel The Way of All Flesh, Butler's most famous work, was written between 1872 and 1885. It is the supposed biography of Ernest Pontifex, narrated by an older friend with an unrelenting candor deliberately affronting conventional pieties.
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
J. A. D. Ingres (1780-1867) was born in Montauban on August 29, 1780, the son of an unsuccessful sculptor and painter. French painter. He was the last grand champion of the French classical tradition of history painting. He was traditionally presented as the opposing force to Delacroix in the early 19th-century confrontation of Neo-classicism and Romanticism, but subsequent assessment has shown the degree to which Ingres, like Neo-classicism, is a manifestation of the Romantic spirit permeating the age. The chronology of Ingres's work is complicated by his obsessive perfectionism, which resulted in multiple versions of a subject and revisions of the original. For this reason, all works cited in this article are identified by catalogue.
Girolamo Nerli
1860-1926,was an Italian painter who worked and travelled in Australia and New Zealand in the late 19th century influencing Charles Conder and Frances Hodgkins and helping to move Australian and New Zealand art in new directions. His portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery Edinburgh, is usually considered the most searching portrayal of the writer. Born in Siena in Italy to an Italian aristocrat, Ferdinando Pieri Nerli, his full name was Girolamo Pieri Pecci Ballati Nerli. The fourth of six children he was not a 'Marchese' as he was sometimes styled, or a 'Count', but a 'patrizio di Siena', a minor distinction marking the great antiquity of his family. His father married Henrietta Medwin, an Englishwoman. Her father Thomas Medwin was a minor literary figure in Byron's circle, the author of Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron and of The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley; Medwin was a distant relation of Shelley. Girolamo studied art in Florence under Antonio Ciseri and Giovanni Muzzioli and was a younger member of the Italian Macchiaioli school, the 'patch painters', an Italian movement anticipating French Impressionism. He went to Australia in 1885 spending time in Melbourne and Sydney where he was an associate of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton and an influence on Charles Conder at the time of the Heidelberg School. Nerli's role in that movement has been disputed but his presence and influence are undeniable. was an Italian painter who worked and travelled in Australia and New Zealand in the late 19th century influencing Charles Conder and Frances Hodgkins and helping to move Australian and New Zealand art in new directions. His portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery Edinburgh, is usually considered the most searching portrayal of the writer. Born in Siena in Italy to an Italian aristocrat, Ferdinando Pieri Nerli, his full name was Girolamo Pieri Pecci Ballati Nerli. The fourth of six children he was not a 'Marchese' as he was sometimes styled, or a 'Count', but a 'patrizio di Siena', a minor distinction marking the great antiquity of his family. His father married Henrietta Medwin, an Englishwoman. Her father Thomas Medwin was a minor literary figure in Byron's circle, the author of Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron and of The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley; Medwin was a distant relation of Shelley. Girolamo studied art in Florence under Antonio Ciseri and Giovanni Muzzioli and was a younger member of the Italian Macchiaioli school, the 'patch painters', an Italian movement anticipating French Impressionism. He went to Australia in 1885 spending time in Melbourne and Sydney where he was an associate of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton and an influence on Charles Conder at the time of the Heidelberg School. Nerli's role in that movement has been disputed but his presence and influence are undeniable.