Incubator escapee wiki

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Article Discussion

Template:Short description Template:Redirect Template:Use American English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox artist

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Template:IPAc-en;<ref>"Renoir". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.</ref> {{#invoke:IPA|main}}; 25 February 1841 – 3 December 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."<ref>Read, Herbert: The Meaning of Art, page 127. Faber, 1931.</ref>

He was the father of actor Pierre Renoir (1885–1952), filmmaker Jean Renoir (1894–1979) and ceramic artist Claude Renoir (1901–1969). He was the grandfather of the filmmaker Claude Renoir (1913–1993), son of Pierre.

LifeEdit

YouthEdit

File:Renoir A Box at the Theater (At the Concert).jpg
A Box at the Theater (At the Concert), 1880, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, in 1841. His father, Léonard Renoir, was a tailor of modest means, so, in 1844, Renoir's family moved to Paris in search of more favorable prospects. The location of their home, in rue d'Argenteuil in central Paris, placed Renoir in proximity to the Louvre. Although the young Renoir had a natural proclivity for drawing, he exhibited a greater talent for singing. His talent was encouraged by his teacher, Charles Gounod, who was the choirmaster at the Church of St Roch at the time. However, due to the family's financial circumstances, Renoir had to discontinue his music lessons and leave school at the age of thirteen to pursue an apprenticeship at a porcelain factory.<ref>Renoir, Jean: Renoir, My Father, pages 57–67. Collins, 1962.</ref><ref name=":0">Template:Cite book</ref>

Although Renoir displayed a talent for his work, he frequently tired of the subject matter and sought refuge in the galleries of the Louvre. The owner of the factory recognized his apprentice's talent and communicated this to Renoir's family. Following this, Renoir started taking lessons to prepare for entry into Ecole des Beaux Arts. When the porcelain factory adopted mechanical reproduction processes in 1858, Renoir was forced to find other means to support his learning.<ref name=":0" /> Before he enrolled in art school, he also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans.<ref>Vollard, Ambroise: Renoir, An Intimate Record, pages 24–29. Knopf, 1925.</ref>

In 1862, he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet.<ref>Vollard, page 30.</ref> At times, during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Renoir had his first success at the Salon of 1868 with his painting Lise with a Parasol (1867), which depicted Lise Tréhot, his lover at the time.<ref name="OxfordArtOnline">Distel, Anne. "Renoir, Auguste." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 27 December 2014.</ref> Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864,<ref>Wadley, Nicholas: Renoir, A Retrospective, page 15. Park Lane, 1989.</ref> recognition was slow in coming, partly as a result of the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War.

During the Paris Commune in 1871, while Renoir painted on the banks of the Seine River, some Communards thought he was a spy and were about to throw him into the river, when a leader of the Commune, Raoul Rigault, recognized Renoir as the man who had protected him on an earlier occasion.<ref>Renoir, Jean, pages 118–21. Different and less life-threatening versions are offered by Paul Valéry and Vollard. In all accounts, however, their re-acquaintance led to great celebration.</ref> In 1874, a ten-year friendship with Jules Le Cœur and his family ended,<ref name="Wadley, page 15">Wadley, page 15.</ref> and Renoir lost not only the valuable support gained by the association but also a generous welcome to stay on their property near Fontainebleau and its scenic forest. This loss of a favorite painting location resulted in a distinct change of subjects.

AdulthoodEdit

Renoir was inspired by the style and subject matter of previous modern painters Camille Pissarro and Édouard Manet.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> After a series of rejections by the Salon juries, he joined forces with Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and several other artists to mount the First Impressionist Exhibition in April 1874, in which Renoir displayed six paintings. Although the critical response to the exhibition was largely unfavorable, Renoir's work was comparatively well received.<ref name="OxfordArtOnline"/> That same year, two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London.<ref name= "Wadley, page 15"/>

File:Auguste Renoir - The Swing - Google Art Project.jpg
The Swing (La Balançoire), 1876, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Hoping to secure a livelihood by attracting portrait commissions, Renoir displayed mostly portraits at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876.<ref name="Brodskaya_114"/> He contributed a more diverse range of paintings the next year when the group presented its third exhibition; they included Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette and The Swing.<ref name="Brodskaya_114">Template:Cite book</ref> Renoir did not exhibit in the fourth or fifth Impressionist exhibitions, and instead resumed submitting his works to the Salon. By the end of the 1870s, particularly after the success of his painting Mme Charpentier and her Children (1878) at the Salon of 1879, Renoir was a successful and fashionable painter.<ref name="OxfordArtOnline"/>

It was also in 1879 that he met the man who was soon to become his main patron, Template:Ill, who regularly invited him to paint and enjoy the Normandy seaside at the Template:Ill

File:Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le Moulin de la Galette.jpg
Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du moulin de la Galette), 1876, Musée d'Orsay

In 1881, he traveled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugène Delacroix,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> then to Madrid, to see the work of Diego Velázquez. Following that, he traveled to Italy to see Titian's masterpieces in Florence and the paintings of Raphael in Rome. On 15 January 1882, Renoir met the composer Richard Wagner at his home in Palermo, Sicily. Renoir painted Wagner's portrait in just thirty-five minutes. In the same year, after contracting pneumonia which permanently damaged his respiratory system, Renoir convalesced for six weeks in Algeria.<ref name="Wadley, page 25">Wadley, p. 25.</ref>

In 1883, Renoir spent the summer in Guernsey, one of the islands in the English Channel with a varied landscape of beaches, cliffs, and bays, where he created fifteen paintings in little over a month. Most of these feature Moulin Huet, a bay in Saint Martin's, Guernsey. These paintings were the subject of a set of commemorative postage stamps issued by the Bailiwick of Guernsey in 1983.

While living and working in Montmartre, Renoir employed Suzanne Valadon as a model, who posed for him (The Large Bathers, 1884–1887; Dance at Bougival, 1883)<ref>Wadley, pages 371, 374.</ref> and many of his fellow painters; during that time, she studied their techniques and eventually became one of the leading painters of the day.

In 1887, the year when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, and upon the request of the queen's associate, Phillip Richbourg, Renoir donated several paintings to the "French Impressionist Paintings" catalog as a token of his loyalty.

File:Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Luncheon of the Boating Party - Google Art Project.jpg
Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–1881

In 1890, he married Aline Victorine Charigot, a dressmaker twenty years his junior,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> who, along with a number of the artist's friends, had already served as a model for Le Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party; she is the woman on the left playing with the dog) in 1881, and with whom he had already had a child, Pierre, in 1885.<ref name="Wadley, page 25"/> After marrying, Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life including their children and their nurse, Aline's cousin Gabrielle Renard. The Renoirs had three sons: Pierre Renoir (1885–1952), who became a stage and film actor; Jean Renoir (1894–1979), who became a filmmaker of note; and Claude Renoir (1901–1969), who became a ceramic artist.

Later yearsEdit

File:Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, by Dornac, BNF Gallica.jpg
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Template:Circa

Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of "Les Collettes", a farm at the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, close to the Mediterranean coast.<ref>Wadley, page 28.</ref> Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life even after his arthritis severely limited his mobility. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to change his painting technique. It has often been reported that in the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers,<ref>André, Albert: Renoir. Crés, 1928.</ref> but this is erroneous; Renoir remained able to grasp a brush, although he required an assistant to place it in his hand.<ref name="bmj">Template:Cite journal</ref> The wrapping of his hands with bandages, apparent in late photographs of the artist, served to prevent skin irritation.<ref name="bmj" />

In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with those of the old masters. During this period, he created sculptures by cooperating with a young artist, Richard Guino, who worked the clay. Due to his limited joint mobility, Renoir also used a moving canvas, or picture roll, to facilitate painting large works.<ref name="bmj" />

Renoir's portrait of Austrian actress Tilla Durieux (1914) contains playful flecks of vibrant color on her shawl that offset the classical pose of the actress and highlight Renoir's skill just five years before his death.

Renoir died in Cagnes-sur-Mer on 3 December 1919 at the age of 78.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Family legacyEdit

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's great-grandson, Alexandre Renoir, has also become a professional artist. In 2018, the Monthaven Arts and Cultural Center in Hendersonville, Tennessee, hosted Beauty Remains, an exhibition of his works. The exhibition title comes from a famous quote by Renoir who, when asked why he continued to paint with his painful arthritis in his advanced years, replied "The pain passes, but the beauty remains."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

ArtworksEdit

File:Two Sisters (On the Terrace).jpg
Two Sisters (On the Terrace), oil on canvas, 1881, Art Institute of Chicago

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. However, in 1876, a reviewer in Le Figaro wrote "Try to explain to Monsieur Renoir that a woman's torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh with those purplish green stains that denote a state of complete putrefaction in a corpse."<ref name="Figaro">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Yet in characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested the details of a scene through freely brushed touches of colour, so that his figures softly fuse with one another and their surroundings.

File:Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1880, Portrait of Mademoiselle Irène Cahen d'Anvers, Sammlung E.G. Bührle.jpg
CitationClass=web }}</ref>

His initial paintings show the influence of the colorism of Eugène Delacroix and the luminosity of Camille Corot. He also admired the realism of Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, and his early work resembles theirs in his use of black as a color. Renoir admired Edgar Degas' sense of movement. Other painters Renoir greatly admired were the 18th-century masters François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard.<ref>Rey, Robert: La Peinture française à la fin du XIXe siècle, la renaissance du sentiment classique : Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Les Beaux-Arts, Van Oest, 1931 (thesis).</ref>

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 a "student" piece, Renoir's heightened personal response to female sensuality is present. The model was Lise Tréhot, the artist's mistress at that time, and inspiration for a number of paintings.<ref>"From the Tour: Mary Cassatt" Template:Webarchive, August Renoir. Retrieved 7 March 2007.</ref>

In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air (outdoors), 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, an effect known today as diffuse reflection. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet worked side-by-side, depicting the same scenes (La Grenouillère, 1869).

One of the best-known Impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Bal du 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. The works of his early maturity were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling color and light.

File:Renoir Blond Bather.jpg
One of a series, Blonde Bather (1881), marked a distinct change in style following a trip to Italy. The work is part of the permanent collection of the Clark Art Institute.

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. It was a trip to Italy in 1881 when he saw works by Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and other Renaissance masters, that convinced him that he was on the wrong path. At that point he declared, "I had gone as far as I could with Impressionism and I realized I could neither paint nor draw".<ref>Ruggiero, Rocky, Renaissancing Renoir, rockyruggiero.com Making Art and History Come To Life webinar, 19 April 2022</ref>

For the next several years he painted in a more severe style in an attempt to return to classicism.<ref>Clark, Kenneth: The Nude, pages 154–61. Penguin, 1960.</ref> Concentrating on his drawing and emphasizing the outlines of figures, he painted works such as Blonde Bather (1881 and 1882) and The Large Bathers (1884–1887; Philadelphia Museum of Art) during what is sometimes referred to as his "Ingres period".<ref>Asked late in life if he felt an affinity to Ingres, he responded: "I should very much like to", Rey, quoted in Wadley, page 336.</ref>

File:Auguste Renoir - Young Girls at the Piano - Google Art Project.jpg
Girls at the Piano, 1892, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

After 1890 he changed direction again. To dissolve outlines, as in his earlier work, he returned to thinly brushed color.

From this period onward he concentrated on monumental nudes and domestic scenes, fine examples of which are Girls at the Piano, 1892, and Grandes Baigneuses, 1887. The latter painting is the most typical and successful of Renoir's late, abundantly fleshed nudes.<ref>"For me, Renoir becomes a really great artist in the late nudes, above all in Les Grandes Baigneuses". David Sylvester, quoted by Wadley, page 378</ref>

A prolific artist, he created 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. The single largest collection of his works—181 paintings in all—is at the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia.

Catalogue raisonnéEdit

A five-volume catalogue raisonné of Renoir's works (with one supplement) was published by Bernheim-Jeune between 1983 and 2014.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Bernheim-Jeune is the only surviving major art dealer that was used by Renoir. The Wildenstein Institute is preparing, but has not yet published, a critical catalogue of Renoir's work.<ref>Wildenstein Institute Template:Webarchive</ref> A disagreement between these two organizations concerning an unsigned work in Picton Castle was at the centre of the second episode of the fourth season of the television series Fake or Fortune.

Posthumous printsEdit

In 1919, Ambroise Vollard, a renowned art dealer, published a book on the life and work of Renoir, La Vie et l'Œuvre de Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in an edition of 1000 copies. In 1986, Vollard's heirs started reprinting the copper plates, generally, etchings with hand applied watercolor. These prints are signed by Renoir in the plate and are embossed "Vollard" in the lower margin. They are not numbered, dated or signed in pencil.

Posthumous salesEdit

A small version of Bal du moulin de la Galette sold for $78.1 million 17 May 1990 at Sotheby's New York.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 2012, Renoir's Paysage Bords de Seine was offered for sale at auction but the painting was discovered to have been stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951. The sale was cancelled.

Gallery of paintingsEdit

Portraits and landscapesEdit

Self-portraitsEdit

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Autoportrait, 1875.jpg

    Self-portrait, 1875

  • Renoir, Pierre-Auguste - Self-portrait - Harvard Art Museums.Fogg Museum.jpg

    Self-portrait, 1876

  • Renoir Self-Portrait 1910.jpg

    Self-portrait, 1910

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Autoportrait 5.JPG

    Self-portrait, 1910

NudesEdit

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir 020.jpg

    Diana, 1867, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Torse, effet de soleil.jpg

    Nude in the Sun, 1875, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

  • Femme Nue dans un Paysage, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, from C2RMF cropped.jpg

    Seated Girl, 1883

  • The river (Le Fleuve) - Renoir - 1885.jpg

    The river (Le Fleuve), 1885

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French - The Large Bathers - Google Art Project.jpg

    The Large Bathers, 1887, Philadelphia Museum of Art

  • 1887, Renoir, Nu Dans un Paysage.jpg

    Nude in a Landscape, 1887, Princeton University Art Museum

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Trois Baigneuses au crabe.jpg

    Three Bathers, 1895, Cleveland Museum of Art Cleveland, Ohio

  • Renoir's Nude.jpg

    Nude, National Museum of Serbia, Belgrade

  • Renoir18.jpg

    After The Bath, 1910, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir 030.jpg

    Woman at the Well, 1910

  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Baigneuse assise s'essuyant une jambe.jpg

    Seated Bather Drying Her Leg, 1914, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris

  • Bathing Women (Auguste Renoir) - Nationalmuseum - 19163.tif

    Women Bathers, 1916, National Museum, Stockholm

  • Pierre Auguste Renoir Les baigneuses.jpg

    Bathers, 1918, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Interactive imageEdit

Template:Align

Close-upsEdit

Template:Multiple image

Template:Multiple image

See alsoEdit

Template:Portal

ReferencesEdit

Template:Reflist

Further readingEdit

External linksEdit

Template:Commons and category Template:Sister projectOn 7 December 2019 the Alberta Symphony Orchestra presented a Tribute to Renoir at Triffo Theater in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, under the direction of pianist and conductor Emilio De Mercato, for the 100th anniversary of the death of Renoir.

Template:Impressionists Template:Pierre-Auguste Renoir Template:Jean Renoir Template:Authority control (arts)

Retrieved from "https://zalansite.site/mediawiki/index.php?title=Pierre-Auguste_Renoir&oldid=16044"