Pierre-Auguste Renoir facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Nationality	French
Known for	Painting
Movement	Impressionism

La Grenouillère 1869. The impressionist nature of this early painting is quite clear.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (25 February 1841–3 December 1919) was a French artist. He was a leading painter who helped to create the Impressionist style. He painted portraits, and still life, but above all, he painted social scenes of the day.

As a painter of women, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau".

Youth
Maturity
Old age
Artworks
Gallery
Images for kids
See also

Youth

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china. He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school. During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.

Maturity

On the Terrace, oil on canvas, 1881, Art Institute of Chicago.

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, an effect today known as diffuse reflection. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet, working side-by-side, depicted the same scenes (La Grenouillère, 1869).

Renoir experienced his initial acclaim when six of his paintings hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. In the same year, two of his works were shown with Paul Durand-Ruel in London.

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 colour and light.

A trip to Italy in 1881, when he saw works by Raphael and other Renaissance masters, convinced him that he was on the wrong path. For the next several years he painted in a more severe, classical, style. After 1890, however, he changed direction again, returning to thinly brushed colour to dissolve outlines as in his earlier work. From this period onward he concentrated on nudes and domestic scenes.

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 reproduced works in the history of art. The single largest collection of his works—181 paintings in all—is at the Barnes Foundation, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

In 1890, he married Aline Victorine Charigot. She, with a number of the artist's friends, had been a model for Le Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881). They already had a child, Pierre, in 1885. After his marriage, Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life, including their children and their nurse, Aline's cousin. The Renoirs had three sons, one of whom, Jean, became a film director of note and another, Pierre, became a stage and film actor.

Old age

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, ca.1910

Self-portrait, 1910

Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of "Les Collettes," a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean coast. Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life, even when arthritis severely limited his movement, and he was wheelchair-bound. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to adapt 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, but this is erroneous; Renoir remained able to grasp a brush, although he required an assistant to place it in his hand. The wrapping of his hands with bandages, apparent in late photographs of the artist, served to prevent skin irritation.

During this period, he created sculptures by cooperating with a young artist, Richard Guino, who worked the clay. Renoir also used a moving canvas, or picture roll, to help him paint large works.

In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, on 3 December.

Artworks

Girls at the Piano, 1892, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Renoir's paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color.

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.

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.

Gallery

Le Ponte-Neuf 1872
Claude Monet painting in his garden at Argenteuil 1873
Dancer 1874
Bal au moulin de la Galette (Montmatre) 1876
Oarsmen at Chatou 1879
Le Déjeuner des canotiers, 1881
Self-portrait 1910
The Theater Box, 1874, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London
The Swing (La Balançoire), 1876, oil on canvas, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Girls at the Piano, 1892, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise, 1879, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France
Lise Sewing, 1866, Dallas Museum of Art
Portrait of Alfred Sisley, 1868
Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil, 1873, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
Portrait of Claude Monet, 1875, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France
A Girl with a Watering Can, 1876, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Mme. Charpentier and her children, 1878, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Portrait of Alphonsine Fournaise, 1879, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France]]
By the Water, 1880, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–1881, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Portrait of Charles and Georges Durand-Ruel, 1882
Dance at Bougival, 1882–1883, (woman at left is painter Suzanne Valadon), Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Dance in the Country (Aline Charigot and Paul Lhote), 1883, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Pencil study for Dance in the Country, 1883, Honolulu Museum of Art
Children at the Beach at Guernsey, 1883, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, "Jeune garçon sur la plage d'Yport", 1883, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Girl With a Hoop, 1885, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Still Life: Flowers, 1885, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Julie Manet with cat, 1887
Portrait of Berthe Morisot and daughter Julie Manet, 1894
Gabrielle Renard and infant son Jean Renoir, 1895
The Artist's Family, 1896, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1908
Portrait of Paul Durand-Ruel, 1910
Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1917
Self-portrait, 1875
Self-portrait, 1876
Self-portrait, 1910

Images for kids

Two Sisters (On the Terrace), oil on canvas, 1881, Art Institute of Chicago
Portrait of Irène Cahen d'Anvers (La Petite Irène), 1880, Foundation E.G. Bührle, Zürich
La Parisienne, 1874, (Henriette Henriot), National Museum Cardiff
The Grands Boulevards, 1875, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Portrait of Jeanne Durand-Ruel, 1876, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Mother and Children, 1876, Frick Collection, New York City
Portrait of Jeanne Samary, 1877, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Boating on the Seine (La Yole), c. 1879
Sleeping Girl with a Cat, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Pink and Blue showing Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d'Anvers, 1881, São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo
The Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1881 (Minneapolis Institute of Art)
Fillette au chapeau bleu, 1881, (Jane Henriot), private collection
Dance at Bougival, 1882–1883, (woman at left is painter Suzanne Valadon), Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Dance in the City, 1883, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France
Children at the Beach at Guernsey, 1883, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Jeune garçon sur la plage d'Yport, 1883, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Tamaris, France, c. 1885 (Minneapolis Institute of Art)
La Roche Guyon, 1885–86, Aberdeen Art Gallery
Young Woman with a Blue Choker, 1888
Young Girl with Red Hair, 1894
Portrait of Berthe Morisot and daughter Julie Manet, 1894
Head of a Young Woman, late 19th century (Minneapolis Institute of Art)
The Artist's Family, 1896, The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia
Woman with a Mandolin, 1919