Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Biography And Paintings Of Renoir, Nineteenth Century French Impressionist Artist

The Swing (La Balançoire), (1876)

Renoir (1841-1919)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was one of the greatest of the French Impressionist painters. With his 'rainbow palette' he painted over 6,000 oil paintings of women, children, flowers and fields. He worked with many other exponents of Impressionism, including Claude Monet and Henri Matisse.

Renoir tended to use heavy impasto and rather dark colour. But after working with Monet in 1868, his colour-palette became lighter, and slowly he mastered the art of plein-air painting, particularly the ability to paint the shimmering colour and flickering light of outdoor scenes, becoming the greatest painter of 'dappled light' in the history of art.

He experienced his first serious acclaim when several of his paintings were displayed in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, alongside artists like Monet, Sisley, Pissaro, Cézanne, and Degas. His paintings also hung in the later Impressionist exhibitions of 1876, 1877 and 1882, and he was a founding member of the review L’Impressionniste (1877), in which he published his article on the principles of contemporary art.

Important works by Renoir at this time included The Swing (1876) and the Dance At The Moulin de la Galette (1876). The models for the latter were mostly his artist friends and local Montmartre girls. In 1990, it sold for $78 million.

Like many impressionist artists, Renoir painted life as he saw it in at dance halls, cafés and other social situations. His friends would assist him moving his canvases back and forth to his art studio.

From 1881, after studying the fine art painting of Raphael, Titian and other Old Masters in Florence and Rome, his drawing became much firmer and his impressionistic style less spontaneous. Rather than painting direct from the object outdoors (Monet's plein-air method), he relied more on preparatory sketches and successive sessions on the canvas in his studio.

In 1883, a successful exhibition established him financially, and it was from this time that his compositions began to change.

Where his early paintings encompassed portrait art, Impressionist landscape painting and groups of figures in settings of cafés, dance-halls, boats, or riverside scenes, his later works are largely nudes or semi-nudes. From hereon, his artistic sensuality, and his admiration of the Italian Renaissance painters separated him from the primary concern of impressionism - to imitate the effects of natural light.

Important Renoir artworks of this period include: Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881), Dance at Bougival (1883), The Bathers (1885), Girls at the Piano (1892).

In 1890, at the age of 49, he married Aline Victorine Charigot with whom he had already had a child, Pierre, in 1885.

From 1903, Renoir fought the encroaching paralysis of arthritis just when his work attained its greatest visual power. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to adapt his painting technique. In his last years, Renoir saw a good deal of Matisse who lived nearby, and was interested in and sympathetic to the ideas behind Fauvism. Sadly, he ended his life crippled with arthritis, so that his last paintings were painted with brushes attached to his twisted fingers.

• For more biographies of great painters, see Old Masters and Famous Artists.
• For information about famous sculptors and painters in Ireland, see: Irish Visual Art

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