Pierre-Auguste Renoir Biography

RENOIR, Pierre Auguste (1841-1919)

Born in Limoges, France, Pierre Auguste Renoir moved to Paris with his family when he was just four years old. At the tender age of thirteen, young Renoir worked at a porcelain factory where he learned his earliest lessons of color and drawing and became a skilled decorator of fine china. The budding artist often visited the Louvre, which was still half-palace and half-museum. There the young budding artist began his formative studies of the French masters.

In 1862, Renoir joined the classical painting school of Charles Gleyre, where he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet, who were all exploring plein air painting and studying the effects of color and light.

He first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1864, but his recognition did not come for nearly a decade. Through the 1860s, he sometimes could hardly afford to even buy paints. Finally in 1874, he displayed six works at the first Salon des Réfuses, the pioneer exhibition of the Impressionists. With a new avant-garde audience, Renoir found acceptance and recognition of his extraordinary abilities.

Although he was one of the most controversial Impressionists, Renoir eventually established himself with the general public and eventually participated in the official Salons. By 1880, he also began concentrating on painting the female figure. But Renoir never gave up his roots as a traditional arts craftsman and as an admirer of the old masters. In the early 1880s Renoir had the feeling of exhaustion and that he had done everything he could do with Impressionist style.

Starting in 1881, Renoir traveled to Algeria, Spain, and Italy, absorbing the styles and techniques of Delacroix, Velazquez, Raphael, and Titian. Through the 1880s, he worked with the Italian style of restrained brushwork and empathetic modeling of subjects, focusing on details and more elaborate lines. In 1883, he spent a prolific summer painting at Guernsey, an island in the English Channel.

As Renoir matured, his style changed again, growing softer and more sketchily outlined. He used very strong colors—often reds and oranges—and thick brush strokes. His preferred subjects were voluptuous young female nudes.

Stricken with severe arthritis, by 1903 he was hardly able to hold the brush. Yet, still determined to paint, he resorted to strapping the brush to his wrist. This improvised technique affected his style in the last decade of his life, but it allowed him to continue painting through the last years of his life. At the end of his life in 1919, Renoir had the rare opportunity to see his own paintings hanging at the Louvre alongside the masterpieces that influenced him as a young boy.

Museum Collections include…

• Art Institute of Chicago
• Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge
• J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
• Louvre Museum, Paris
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
• Minneapolis Institute of Arts
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
• National Gallery of Canada, National Gallery, London
• Norton Museum of Art, Florida
• State Hermitage Museum, Russia
• Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums, Scotland
• Accademia Carrara, Italy
• Appleton Museum of Art, Florida
• Chrysler Museum, Virginia
• Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio
• Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
• Folkwang Museum, Germany
• Joslyn Art Museum, Nebraska
• Le Chateau-Musee de Dieppe, France
• Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec
• Musée d’Orsay, Paris
• Musee des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux
• Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
• Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon
• Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, Brazil
• National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
• National Museum, Sweden
• New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana
• Norton Simon Museum, California
• Portland Museum of Art, Maine
• Reading Public Museum, Pennsylvania
• Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel
• Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Connecticut
• Wright Museum of Art at Beloit College, Wisconsin