RENOIR, Pierre Auguste (Limoges, 1841 – Cagnes, 1919)
Born in Limoges on 25 February 1841 into a family of tailors, Pierre Auguste Renoir was an apprentice with a porcelain painter before enrolling in 1861 in Gleyre’s studio in Paris, where he met Monet and Sisley. He was an enthusiast of open-air painting, and worked in the woods of Fontainebleau and in the suburbs of Paris. His pictures were regularly exhibited in the Salon from 1864 onwards. After the Franco-Prussian war, he helped to create the Impressionist group, with which he exhibited until 1877. After that he preferred to show his works at the Salon and to execute commissions of portraits for rich art lovers, which brought him acknowledgement and financial security. He also painted open-air scenes describing the leisure activities of the Parisians, such as the Moulin de la Galette (1876) and The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–1881).
From 1881, Renoir travelled to Algeria and then to Italy, where he was able to admire Raphael’s frescoes. At that point he decided to move away from Impressionism in order to give a greater solidity to his art. This period of his career has been qualified as Ingresque, due to the importance Renoir attributed to the line. The influence of Cézanne, with whom he worked on several occasions in the Midi, was also strong. The subject of the bathers, masterfully treated in 1887 in a large composition entitled The Bathers (Philadelphia Museum of Art), is paramount in his work. In 1890, Renoir married his model Aline Charigot, by whom he already had a child, Pierre, born in 1885, and who gave him two other children, Jean—the future film director—born in 1894 and Claude, born in 1901.
From the 1890s, Renoir, who was considered the painter of modernity, increasingly concentrated on allegorical themes or scenes representing young women. He discovered Cagnes, on the Côte d’Azur, in 1898, and shared his time between his studio in Montmartre, the village of Essoyes, in Burgundy, the birthplace of his wife’s family, and the Midi, where the climate was kinder to his health, increasingly threatened by arthritis. His works were then influenced by the 18th-century painters, and Rubens in particular, whom he greatly admired.
The pictures of the last years of his life, mainly nudes, are strongly impregnated with classicism. The artist also experimented with sculptures. He died in Cagnes on 3 December 1919, as a greatly admired artist.
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