Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Wikipedia

Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that February 25 is the anniversary of the birth of French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, commonly known as Auguste Renoir who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style.
Rest in peace Pierre-Auguste Renoir!

Pierre-Auguste Renoir Biography - Goodbye-Art Academy. He would strap the brushes to his hands to continue to paint.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF_nArPfEgs

Images from theartstory.org/artist-renoir-pierre-auguste-artworks.htm
1. La Grenouillère (1869) Pierre Auguste Renoir "Artwork description & Analysis: At the popular outdoor bathing spot and bar La Grenouillère ("The Frog Pond"), Renoir and Monet, not yet financially successful artists, painted images of middle-class leisure that they hoped to sell to its wealthy clientele. As they worked closely alongside one another, the two simultaneously developed several of the theories, techniques, and practices that would give rise to Impressionism. Both artists painted this scene from this exact vantage point. If Monet's gives a broader perspective and focuses more on the vivid effects of light on the water and surrounding trees, then Renoir's version gives a closer view of the fashionable denizens of the popular resort. Indeed, even when painting nature en plein air, Renoir gave a weight to the human subject perhaps unmatched by his fellow Impressionists."
2. La Loge (1874) Pierre Auguste Renoir "Artwork description & Analysis: Depicting an elegant-looking couple sitting in an elevated theater box, this tribute to Parisian modern life was also the artist's principal contribution to the very first Impressionist exhibition of the same year, and it was met with much acclaim. The theater played a prominent role in Parisian life, from opera to the popular variety shows featuring can-can dancers, and depictions of the theater typically focused on the performers. However, much of the allure of the theater for the middle class was the opportunity to see and be seen, and La Loge deftly captures that complex interplay of gazes. The woman lowers her opera glasses, implying that she is no longer watching the events on stage and allowing her face to be seen. Meanwhile, the man (Renoir's brother Edmond) leans back in his seat, perusing the theatergoers in other balconies through his glasses. With his delicate and masterful rendering of his model's lacy bodice, glinting jewelry, and floral accoutrements, Renoir painted a canvas about seeing that spoke to his own keen eye."
3. Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) Pierre Auguste Renoir "Artwork description & Analysis: In Luncheon of the Boating Party, Renoir depicted a number of his close friends, including painters, art dealers, and his future wife Aline Charigot, in a smaller, more intimate setting than in a painting like Dance at the Moulin de la Galette. Though he uses smaller groupings of figures to manage the fourteen partygoers (and one dog), he renders the scene without making it feel staged like a group portrait. Looking beyond the individual subjects of Luncheon, there exists an amount of composition typically foreign to Impressionist canvases. Indeed, in the early 1880s, Renoir began to reintegrate classical notions of composition into his canvases; here, he used the boat's railing to create a diagonal axis from background to foreground, gradually making the scene less congested and more full of patterns of light, shadow, and color. Coupled with his intense study of surface (glass, flesh, straw, various textiles) is a sweetness in the image of Charigot smooching at a toy terrier that is representative of the best of Renoir's work.
4. Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette) (1876) Pierre Auguste Renoir. Since our friend LTC Stephen C. mentioned that this is his favorite paining by Renoir :-)
"Artwork description & Analysis: Universally considered among Renoir's masterpieces, Dance at the Moulin de la Galette is a snapshot of everyday life in the fashionable neighborhood of Montmartre. The courtyard of the Moulin de la Galette, still in operation today, was a gathering place for working-class drinking, dining, and dancing. Moulin presented Renoir with a true and unique challenge: the sheer quantity of people, details, and viewpoints to capture, combined with the flickering sunlight and inherent movement that came with such a scene, was an awesome undertaking. His solution was a significantly larger-than-average canvas for an Impressionist painting (over four-by-six feet), in which he unified several vignettes of activity, several couples dancing, a table of friends drinking, and standing groups talking, with colorful brushstrokes that denote zones of shade and light from the canopy of trees overhead.

Background from pierre-auguste-renoir.org/biography.html
"BIOGRAPHY OF PIERRE AUGUSTE RENOIR

YOUTH
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china. He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school. During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.
In 1862 he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet. At times during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864, recognition did not come for another ten years, due, in part, to the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War.
During the Paris Commune in 1871, while he painted on the banks of the Seine River, some members of a commune group thought he was a spy, and were about to throw him into the river when a commune leader, Raoul Rigault, recognized Renoir as the man who had protected him on an earlier occasion.
In 1874, a ten-year friendship with Jules Le Coeur and his family ended, and Renoir lost not only the valuable support gained by the association, but a generous welcome to stay on their property near Fontainebleau and its scenic forest. This loss of a favorite painting location resulted in a distinct change of subjects.

MATURITY
Renoir experienced his initial acclaim when six of his paintings hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. In the same year two of his works were shown with Durand-Ruel in London.
In 1881, he traveled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugène Delacroix, then to Madrid, in Spain, to see the work of Diego Velázquez. Following that he traveled to Italy to see Titian's masterpieces in Florence, and the paintings of Raphael in Rome. On January 15, 1882 Renoir met the composer Richard Wagner at his home in Palermo, Sicily. Renoir painted Wagner's portrait in just thirty-five minutes. In the same year, Renoir convalesced for six weeks in Algeria after contracting pneumonia, which would cause permanent damage to his respiratory system.
In 1883, he spent the summer in Guernsey, creating fifteen paintings in little over a month. Most of these feature Moulin Huet, a bay in Saint Martin's, Guernsey. Guernsey is one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, and it has a varied landscape which includes beaches, cliffs, bays, forests, and mountains. These paintings were the subject of a set of commemorative postage stamps, issued by the Bailiwick of Guernsey in 1983.
While living and working in Montmartre, Renoir employed as a model Suzanne Valadon, who posed for him (The Bathers, 1885-7; Dance at Bougival, 1883) and many of his fellow painters while studying their techniques; eventually she became one of the leading painters of the day.
In 1887, a year when Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee, and upon the request of the queen's associate, Phillip Richbourg, he donated several paintings to the "French Impressionist Paintings" catalog as a token of his loyalty.
In 1890 he married Aline Victorine Charigot, who, along with a number of the artist's friends, had already served as a model for Les Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881), and with whom he had already had a child, Pierre, in 1885. After his marriage Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life, including their children and their nurse, Aline's cousin Gabrielle Renard. The Renoirs had three sons, one of whom, Jean, became a filmmaker of note and another, Pierre, became a stage and film actor.

LATER YEARS
Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of "Les Collettes," a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean coast. Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life, even when arthritis severely limited his movement, and he was wheelchair-bound. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to adapt his painting technique. In the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers.
During this period he created sculptures by directing an assistant who worked the clay. Renoir also used a moving canvas, or picture roll, to facilitate painting large works with his limited joint mobility.
In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, on December 3.

ARTWORKS
Renoir's paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color, most often focusing on people in intimate and candid compositions. The female nude was one of his primary subjects. In characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested the details of a scene through freely brushed touches of color, so that his figures softly fuse with one another and their surroundings.
His initial paintings show the influence of the colourism of Eugène Delacroix and the luminosity of Camille Corot. He also admired the realism of Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, and his early work resembles theirs in his use of black as a color. As well, Renoir admired Edgar Degas' sense of movement. Another painter Renoir greatly admired was the 18th century master François Boucher.
A fine example of Renoir's early work, and evidence of the influence of Courbet's realism, is Diana, 1867. Ostensibly a mythological subject, the painting is a naturalistic studio work, the figure carefully observed, solidly modeled, and superimposed upon a contrived landscape. If the work is still a 'student' piece, already Renoir's heightened personal response to female sensuality is present. The model was Lise Tréhot, then the artist's mistress and inspiration for a number of paintings.
In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water en plein air (in the open air), he and his friend Claude Monet discovered that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet, working side-by-side, depicted the same scenes (La Grenouillère, 1869).

One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette). The painting depicts an open-air scene, crowded with people, at a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre, close to where he lived.

The works of his early maturity were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling colour and light. By the mid-1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women, such as The Bathers, which was created during 1884-87. It was a trip to Italy in 1881, when he saw works by Raphael and other Renaissance masters, that convinced him that he was on the wrong path, and for the next several years he painted in a more severe style, in an attempt to return to classicism. This is sometimes called his "Ingres period", as he concentrated on his drawing and emphasized the outlines of figures.

After 1890, however, he changed direction again, returning to the use of thinly brushed color which dissolved outlines as in his earlier work. From this period onward he concentrated especially on monumental nudes and domestic scenes, fine examples of which are Girls at the Piano, 1892, and Grandes Baigneuses, 1918-19. The latter painting is the most typical and successful of Renoir's late, abundantly fleshed nudes.

A prolific artist, he made several thousand paintings. The warm sensuality of Renoir's style made his paintings some of the most well-known and frequently-reproduced works in the history of art.

ASSESSMENT
Acknowledging modern criticism of Renoir's sensuality, Lawrence Gowing wrote: “ "Is there another respected modern painter whose work is so full of charming people and attractive sentiment? Yet what lingers is not cloying sweetness but a freshness that is not entirely explicable...One feels the surface of his paint itself as living skin: Renoir's aesthetic was wholly physical and sensuous, and it was unclouded...These interactions of real people fulfilling natural drives with well-adjusted enjoyment remain the popular masterpieces of modern art (as it used to be called), and the fact that they are not fraught and tragic, without the slightest social unrest in view, or even much sign of the spacial and communal disjunction which some persist in seeking, is far from removing their interests." ”

Albert Aurier, an art critic and early essayist on the impressionists, wrote in 1892: “ "With such ideas, with such a vision of the world and of femininity, one might have feared that Renoir would create a work which was merely pretty and merely superficial. Superficial it was not; in fact it was profound, for if, indeed, the artist has almost completely done away with the intellectuality of his models in his paintings, he has, in compensation, been prodigal with his own. As to the pretty, it is undeniable in his work, but how different from the intolerable prettiness of fashionable painters." ”

In a preview to the exhibition 'Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883' at the National Gallery, London in spring 2007, The Guardian wrote that "Even Degas laughed at his friend's style, calling it as puffy as cotton wool," but that "if we're going to love him, we need to love his chocolate box qualities, too."

FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Orlando Illi Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. 'Bill' Price CPT Jack Durish Capt Tom Brown CMSgt (Join to see) MSG Andrew White SGT (Join to see) Sgt Albert Castro SSgt Boyd Herrst] SSG Ray Adkins SGT Charles H. Hawes SSG Martin Byrne PO1 William "Chip" Nagel CPT Gabe SnellLTC Greg Henning SPC Margaret Higgins

Maj Marty Hogan, my wife is a Francophile and French Impressionism is one of her strong suits. She has many books on Impressionism, so I've seen much work from the artists of that period. My favorite Renoir is Moulin de la Galette.

He did some truly amazing work Maj Marty Hogan