Monday, August 21, 2017

Artist of the day, August 21: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French painter, (Impressionist)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, commonly known as Auguste Renoir (1841 – 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.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French Impressionist painter whose eye for beauty made him one of the movement's most popular practitioners. He is best known for his paintings of bustling Parisian modernity and leisure in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Though celebrated as a colorist with a keen eye for capturing the movement of light and shadow, Renoir started to explore Renaissance painting in the middle of his career, which led him to integrate more line and composition into his mature works and create some of his era's most timeless canvases.

Working alongside Claude Monet, Renoir was essential to developing Impressionist style in the late 1860s, but there is a decidedly human element to his work that sets him apart. Renoir had a brilliant eye for both intimate domesticity and the day's fashions, and his images of content families and well-dressed Parisian pleasure seekers created a bridge from Impressionism's more experimental aims to a modern, middle-class art public.

Renoir was the first Impressionist to perceive the potential limitations of an art based primarily on optical sensation and light effects. Though his discoveries in this field would always remain integral to his art, he reasserted the necessity of composition and underlying structure in modern painting, achieving in his mature work a structured, monumental style that acknowledged the strengths of High Renaissance art.

Renoir's example became indispensible for the major French movements of high modernism: Fauvism and Cubism. Like Renoir, the progenitors of these styles focused on issues of color, composition, and depth rather than quick sketches of individual moments. His composed, vivid paintings created a vital bridge from earlier colorists like Raphael, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Eugène Delacroix to the twentieth-century giants Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.




1862.   Sleeping cat

1866.   Bouquet of spring flowers

1866.   Flowers in a vase

1870.   A road in Louveciennes

1874.   Camille Monet and her son Jean in the garden at Argenteuil

1874.   Landscape between storms

1874.  The fisherman

1875.  A waitress at Duval's Restaurant

1875.  Woman with a parasol in a garden

1876.  Dance at Moulin de la Galette

1877.  Eugène Murer

1877.  The Milliner

1878.  Jeanne Samary

1878.  Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguérite-Louise Lemonnier,  and Her Children,
Georgette-Berthe  and Paul-Émile-Charles)

1879.  Marguerite-Thérèse (Margot) Berard

1880.  In the woods

1880. The luncheon of the boating party

1880. View of the Seacoast near Wargemont in Normandy

1881.  Still life with peaches

1881.  The Doges Palace

1881.  The Seine at Chatou

1881.  Two Sisters Aka on the terrace

1882.  Portrait of Charles and Georges Durand Ruel

1883,  By the seashore

1883.  Hills around the Bay of Moulin Huet, Guernsey

1883.  Reclining nude

1885,  In the garden


1888.  The daughters of Catulle Mendès, Huguette, Claudine, and Helyonne

1889.  Flowers and fruit
1890.  Landscape at Vetheuil
1890.  The meadow

1890.  Two girls reading in the garden

1892.  Two young girls at the piano

1892.  Young girl bathing

1896.  The artist's family

1898.  Young spanish woman with a guitar

1901. Landscape Auvers-sur-Oise

1914. Tilla Durieux (Ottilie Godeffroy)

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