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 :. | Claude Monet (mk06) | Child with Toys(Gabrielle and Jean) | Therse Berard | Three Bathers by the Water | The Apple Seller |
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TRAVERSI, Gaspare
Italian Painter, ca.1722-1770 Italian painter. He was apprenticed to the elderly Francesco Solimena, whose late style, a reinterpretation of the Baroque art of Mattia Preti, influenced his earliest works. At the same time he studied the naturalist painters of the 17th century: Preti himself, Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, Jusepe de Ribera, Filippo Vitale and Francesco Fracanzano. Classical art also attracted him, and in the 1740s he began to make journeys to Rome to study the influential works of Bolognese and Roman classicism: paintings by Guido Reni, Guercino and the Carracci family, and by Carlo Maratti. During one of these visits he copied two pictures by Maratti, then in S Isidoro, Rome: the Flagellation and a Crucifixion . In the following year he was in Naples; three canvases of scenes from the Life of the Virgin (Naples, S Maria dell'Aiuto), one of which is signed and dated 1749
Sanford Robinson Gifford
1823-1880 Sanford Robinson Gifford (July 10, 1823 ?C August 29, 1880) was an American landscape painter and one of the leading members of the Hudson River School. Gifford's landscapes are known for their emphasis on light and soft atmospheric effects, and he is regarded as a practitioner of Luminism, an offshoot style of the Hudson River School. Returning to his studio in New York City, Gifford painted numerous major landscapes from scenes he recorded on his travels. Gifford's method of creating a work of art was similar to other Hudson River School artists. He would first sketch rough, small works in oil paint from his sketchbook pencil drawings. Those scenes he most favored he then developed into small, finished paintings, then into larger, finished paintings.
Nicolae Tonitza
(Romanian pronunciation: [nikoˈla.e toˈnit͡sa]; April 13, 1886 - February 27, 1940) was a Romanian painter, engraver, lithographer, journalist and art critic. Drawing inspiration from Post-impressionism and Expressionism, he had a major role in introducing modernist guidelines to local art. Born in Bârlad, he left his home town in 1902 in order to attend the Iaşi National School of Fine Arts, where he had among his teachers Gheorghe Popovici and Emanoil Bardasare.The following year he visited Italy together with University of Bucharest students of archeology under the direction of Grigore Tocilescu.During that period, together with some of his fellow students, Tonitza painted the walls of Grozeşti church. In 1908 he left for Munich, where he attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts; he began publishing political cartoons in Furnica, and contributing art criticism articles to Arta Română. Tonitza spent the following three years in Paris, where he visited artists' studios, and studied famous paintings.Although the young artist's creation would initially conform to the prevalent style, his gift for colour and his personal touch would eventually lead him towards experiment.Throughout his life, he remained committed to the Munich School, hailing its innovative style over the supposedly "obscure imitators of Matisse".