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 :. | Suzanne Valadon | Lisa with Parasol | Portrait of Madame Henriot | Boating on the Seine | Lady at Piano |
Related Artists:
Eugenio Gignous
(Milan, 1850 - Stresa (Verbania), 1906) was an Italian painter. The son of a silk merchant from Lyon, Gignous displayed a precocious talent for painting and enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 1864, attending the courses on landscape taught by Luigi Riccardi and then Gaetano Fasanotti. He came into contact with the Milanese Scapigliatura movement when still very young and formed a close friendship with Tranquillo Cremona. He began to focus exclusively on landscape in the 1870s, experimenting with painting en plein air and producing views of the Lombard and Piedmontese countryside that he showed at all the major national exhibitions. The late 1870s saw a more naturalistic approach to landscape painting under the influence of Filippo Carcano, with whom Gignous went to paint on Lake Maggiore in 1879, thus inaugurating a thematic repertoire devoted primarily to views of the Verbano, Mottarone and Val deOssola. Some biographical notes written by the artistes wife Matilde would appear to bear out the hypothesis of a trip to Paris in the company of Carcano in 1878 and attest to friendship with Vincenzo Vela, who was apparently his host on numerous occasions in Ligornetto. A recognised leader of the Lombard school of painting, he lived in Stresa and on the coast of Liguria from 1887 to 1906, his year of his death, with long stays in Venice. The Venice Biennale held a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1907.
Arthur Dove
American 1880-1946 Dove returned to America in 1909 and met Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz, the eldest child of a New York rich family and was send to study in Germany at the age of 16 where he was overtaken with the passion of photography. In 1905 he returned to New York with 15 years of experience he was at the front lines to make photography respected as one of the fine art. Alfred Stieglitz was a well known photographer and gallery owner who was very active in promoting modern art in America. In his attempt to educate the art public, he started to introduce other art besides photography. Along with American modernists he would show European work. These pieces had never been seen in the United States.[1] Stieglitz was a New York art world celebrity.[1] Dove made the decision to quit his career as an illustrator but was in need of artistic identity along with emotional bolstering and Stieglitz filled both.[5] The photographer was 61, 16 years younger than Dove and with Anglo-Saxon heritage, being Protestant with a small town background was in contrast to Stieglitz??s experience being urban, Jewish and rooted in European culture. Dove was gentle, quite, and a good friend while Stieglitz was argumentative and shrewd. They both had in common that they believed art forms should embody modern spiritual values not materialism and tradition. Stieglitz was later the husband of the famed painter Georgia O??Keeffe. With Stiegliz??s support, Dove produced what are known as the first purely abstract paintings to come out of America. Dove exhibited his works at Stieglitz??s ??291?? gallery in 1910 and in 1912 when he had his first one-man exhibition. The 1910 show ??Younger American Painters?? put Dove in the company of his old friend Maurer. Dove showed one painting, a large still life painted in France ??The Lobster??, which would be his last representational work. The 1912 show at the ??291??, Doves only one man showed a group of pastels that came to be know as ??Ten Commandments??, would be the first public display of nonillusionistic art by an American. In the two years since meeting Stieglitz Dove found himself as a leader in international art developments. From 1912 to 1946 Dove showed his work yearly at Stieglitz??s galleries, ??291??, ??intimate Gallery?? and ??An American Place.?? Dove??s works were based in natural forms and he referred to his form of abstraction as ??extraction,?? in essence, extracting the essential forms of a scene from a nature.
Jan Boeckhorst
Born in Westphalia, in either Menster or Rees, Boeckhorst moved to Antwerp around 1626. He had a close relationship with Rubens's studio, finishing paintings designed by that master as well as assisting with large series such as the joyous entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand in 1635 and the Torre de la Parada. He also collaborated as a figure painter in landscapes and still lifes by Jan Wildens and Frans Snyders, and sometimes painted lively group portraits.[1] He traveled to Italy in the years 1635-1639 and joined the Bentvueghels with the nickname Lange Jan (Tall John). Cornelis de Bie, in his Gulden Cabinet der Edel Vry Schilderconst (The Golden Cabinet of the Honourable Free Art of Painting; 1662), remarks that Boeckhorst was a student of Jordaens. Works in that master's style include large genre paintings of the 1640s such as Peasants going to Market (Antwerp, Rubenshuis), which also acts as an allegory of the four elements. In the 1650s and 1660s Boeckhorst painted altarpieces for churches throughout Flanders and designed cartoons for tapestries.