Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1841 Limoges - 1919 Cagnes-sur-Mer The French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges on February 25, 1841. In 1845 the Renoir family moved to Paris, where they lived near the Louvre. From 1856 Pierre-Auguste Renoir completes an apprenticeship as a porcelain painter. He frequently visited the Louvre Picture Gallery and discovered for himself French Rococo painting with paintings by François Boucher, Jean-François Watteau and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, for example, as well as the masterpieces of Peter Paul Rubens. In 1962-1964 Renoir attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he studied in the studio of the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre, where he met Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley. Ìain actor at the beginning of Impressionism in Paris As early as 1964 Pierre-Auguste Renoir was able to exhibit his paintings at the Salon in Paris. Inspired by his acquaintance with Gustave Courbet and the painters of the Barbizon School, who painted outdoors in the forest of Fontainebleau, the painter friends Renoir, Bazille, Sisley and others also began to paint outdoors, from which the style of Impressionism was to emerge a little later. In 1872 Claude Monet painted the work "Impression - Soleil levant" (Musée Marmottan, Paris), which is regarded as the eponymous work of Impressionism. And Pierre-Auguste Renoir is also one of the main protagonists of French Impressionism from the 1870s. He participated in the first three group exhibitions of Impressionists in Paris in 1874, 1876 and 1877. In 1877, 21 works by Renoir are exhibited, including the painting "Bal au Moulin de la Galette" (Musée d'Orsay, Paris), which is hung centrally within the exhibition and recreates the experience of dancing outdoors, in the light shade under trees. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's life situation, however, dictated that he continue to exhibit in the traditional salon in Paris. Art purchases by the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and the acquaintance with the customs official Victor Choquet and the publisher Georges Charpentier improve the financial situation. Through the mediation of Madame Charpentier, Pierre-Auguste Renoir receives numerous portrait commissions from Parisian society. Abwendung vom Impressionismus und Schaffenenskrise in den 1880er Jahren Ab den 1880er Jahren turn Pierre-Auguste Renoir away from Impressionism, because he sees in it the danger of complete dissolution of form, which he rejects for his painting. In 1881/82 Pierre-Auguste Renoir undertook three major trips to Algeria and through Italy. These are the countries that stand for the painting of the two great models Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and thus for the French painter's dispute in the 18th century about the predominance of either color (Delacroix, who revels in the color frenzy of Algerian motifs) or line (Ingres, following the primacy of line in the tradition of Raphael). Pierre-Auguste Renoir, in his now drier style of painting, arrived at a consolidation of form with more strongly accentuated contours and plastic modeling of the physical. But in the 1880s he also experienced a creative crisis, and the works he was now producing tended to meet with disinterest from the public. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting "Les Grandes Baigneuses" from 1887, for which he made countless preliminary studies and which contains an abundance of art historical quotations, is exemplary for the search of the 1880s. Lively, sensual forms and bright colors in his late work In the late 1880s, Renoir's enjoyment of color and sensual painting increasingly returned to his paintings. In 1890 Renoir married his longtime lover Aline Charigot, who gave birth to his first son, Pierre Renoir, as early as 1885, as well as his second, Jean Renoir, in 1894, and Claude Renoir, his third son, in 1901. Pierre-Auguste Renoir's late work includes numerous still lifes and figure paintings, especially women, which he painted in characteristically soft, lovely forms and pastel colors in a delicate, airy brushstroke. He devoted numerous paintings, pastels, drawings, and later sculptural works to the representation of his family. Much of the formal language of his late work is reminiscent of the rococo painting that Renoir so admired in his youth at the Louvre. From 1898 Pierre-Auguste Renoir showed the first serious signs of rheumatoid arthritis, which made it increasingly difficult for him to paint. But the success of his painting is assured, through the gallery owner Paul Durand-Ruel most of his paintings are successfully sold in the 1990s and Renoir can move for the sake of his health to the warm south of France, where he spends the last years of his life until 1919. In 1907 Renoir bought the estate "Les Collettes" in Cagnes-sur-Mer, here he had a building and two studios built. "Les Collettes" becomes the meeting place of the younger generation of painters, such as Maurice Denis, Pierre Bonnard, Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse, who visit the great Renoir here. Despite his physical ailments, he continued to paint daily. On December 3, 1919, Pierre-Auguste Renoir died in Cagne-sur-Mer as a result of pneumonia.