Modern Age
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
French Impressionism painter.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was the Impressionist of pleasure — the painter who insisted, against the whole tenor of modern art, that a picture ought to be lovable, warm, and joyful. Born in Limoges to a working-class family, he began as a decorator of porcelain, and the light touch and love of pretty color he learned there never left him. In the 1860s, studying in Gleyre's Paris atelier, he fell in with Monet, Sisley, and Bazille, and through the following decade the young friends invented Impressionism together, painting the leisure of the modern city in flickering, sun-dappled color.
Renoir's finest Impressionist years produced the great scenes of Parisian sociability — dances, boating parties, café gardens — crowded with laughing faces and shot through with the play of sunlight through leaves. Around 1881, after travelling to Italy and studying Raphael and the antique, he grew dissatisfied with what he felt was the formlessness of pure Impressionism and entered a drier, more linear 'Ingresque' phase, determined to relearn drawing and structure. In his last decades, settled in the warm south, he returned to color at full strength in ample, rose-fleshed nudes and family idylls.
Crippled by rheumatoid arthritis in old age, he painted with the brush strapped or wedged into his deformed hands, working almost to the day he died in 1919. His son Jean, the film director, later set down many of his sayings, and the dealer Ambroise Vollard recorded his talk — sources that preserve, as reported speech, Renoir's cheerful conviction that art exists to give delight.
The words the record keeps using: warm, joyful, sensuous, convivial, charming, radiant.
At a glance
- Lived 1841–1919
- Origin French
- Worked in Paris
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Impressionism
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Alla prima (wet-in-wet), Broken color, En plein air painting
Works in the archive
- Bal du moulin de la Galette, 1876 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
A Sunday afternoon dance at an open-air café in Montmartre, thronged with young working Parisians talking, flirting, and turning in the dappled light beneath the trees. It is the great manifesto of Impressionist… - The Swing (La Balançoire), 1876 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)
In a sun-flecked garden a young woman stands on a swing, glancing shyly aside as a man addresses her and a child watches; the scene, painted in the same Montmartre garden as the Moulin de la Galette, is a study of… - Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880 (The Phillips Collection, Washington)
Renoir's friends linger over the remains of a lunch on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise restaurant on the Seine at Chatou, wine and fruit on the table, a little dog in the foreground. It gathers a cross-section of… - Dance at Bougival, 1883 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
A couple whirls in a country dance at the riverside resort of Bougival, the woman in a red bonnet leaning happily into her partner's arms, spent cigarette and bouquet dropped at their feet. One of a trio of…
What was said
As his son Jean recorded, Renoir insisted that a painting should be a pleasant, joyful, and pretty thing — there being quite enough tiresome and ugly things in the world already — and defended without apology the idea that art may exist simply to give delight.
In Vollard's record of their conversations, Renoir spoke of his lifelong delight in painting the light on flesh and the roundness of the living body, saying he needed to feel that he could go on caressing a figure with his brush indefinitely.
Renoir's friend the critic Georges Rivière reported that the great 'Bal du moulin de la Galette' was painted largely in the open air on the site in Montmartre, the artist carrying the big canvas to the garden to catch the real movement of the sunlit crowd.
Lineage
Learned from Eugène Delacroix, Paolo Veronese
What would Pierre-Auguste make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Pierre-Auguste Renoir", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Pierre-Auguste · Keep a life moment the way Pierre-Auguste would · Pictures made after Pierre-Auguste