A French painter of great repute, Pierre-Auguste Renoir is a pioneering name in the development of French Impressionism, best known for the unabashed celebration of feminine sensuality, Parisian modernity and leisure in his paintings. Renoir’s paintings are marked by their saturated color and vibrant light, and a wonderful interplay of light and shadow. However, he also veered towards the Renaissance style of painting in the middle of his career, integrating more composition and line in his later works to create some of his most celebrated masterpieces that included his female nudes.
Though originally born in the Limoges city of France, Renoir spent the greater part of his childhood in Paris and developed an interest in art quite early in his life. His family, sensing his natural inclination towards art, admitted him in a porcelain factory to work as an apprentice at the age of thirteen. He learned the art of decorating plates with bouquets of flowers, and painting fans and cloth panels signifying religious themes to be hung in churches.
The immense joy he felt in his work, coupled with his innate talent, prompted him to consider studying painting seriously. He soon started painting lessons from Charles Gleyre, a Swiss Neoclassical artist and also came into contact with Claude Monet, Frederic Bazille and Alfred Sisley, all of whom would later go on to become the frontrunners of Impressionist paintings, just like Renoir himself. Moving away from the then convention of executing a painting inside the studio, Renoir, along with his newfound friends, temporarily moved to the forest of Fontainebleau to paint directly from nature. This heralded the birth of a completely new pictorial language, which later took the form of Impressionism.
Renoir’s work at this stage embodied the very spirit of Impressionism. He used small, vivid strokes to evoke the dazzling effect of foliage, the vibrancy of the atmosphere and particularly the radiance of a young lady’s skin in the outdoors. He religiously strove to exclude black from his paintings and suffuse them with light instead. Renoir was also different from the other Impressionist painters of his time and was more interested in the human figure than landscape unlike his contemporaries. This helped him secure a number of orders for portraits, which gradually ensured his access to the upper-middle-class society where he started getting regular orders for portraits, particularly of children and women. He produced some of his greatest masterpieces during this time: La Loge (1874), Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (1876), Madame Charpentier and Her Children (1878) and Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-1881). A personal exhibition was also organized in 1879 for his works in the renowned gallery La Vie Moderne.
Towards the beginning of the 1880s, Renoir’s several trips to Provence, Italy and Algeria brought about a change in his perspective towards art. He realized the inadequacy of the Impressionistic technique in successfully conveying the smooth effects of the skin. He also questioned the complete denouncement of the color black. His frequent trips to Italy had brought him closer to Classicism, a style marked by the use of clear lines to describe a form and smooth painting to augment the litheness of a body. Consequently, his paintings from 1883 to 1884 were characterized by emphasis upon contours, form, line and volume rather than brushstroke and color leading to a markedly different and new discipline termed later by many art historians as “Ingres”, naturally inspired from Ingres’ techniques.
Owing to frequent attacks of rheumatism, Renoir started travelling more frequently to southern France for its healthier climate. Though somewhat crippled by the several deformities caused by arthritis, he continued painting during the last 20 years of his life. Interestingly, his themes during this time became more intimate and personal as he focused on painting his children, wife and maid, Gabrielle who often posed nude for his paintings. After his stroke in 1912, he was bound to a wheelchair. However, his creative energies found a new outlet in sculpting and he worked with his assistants to create sculptures based on his paintings.
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