Pierre-Auguste Renoir | Impressionist painter

Famed for his sensual charming scenes of pretty women, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) was a far more complex and thoughtful painter than generally assumed.

He was a founding member of the Impressionist movement, nevertheless he ceased to exhibit with the group after 1877.

From the 1880s until well into the twentieth century, he developed a monumental, classically inspired style that influenced such avant-garde giants as Pablo Picasso.

Renoir began his artistic career as a porcelain painter; however, his ambitions to become a professional artist prompted him to seek other instruction.

He began copying paintings at the Louvre in 1860 and eventually entered the studio of the academic artist Charles Gleyre, where he met Claude Monet, Frédéric Bazille and Alfred Sisley.

The four friends soon began painting in the forest of Fontainebleau, although Renoir always remained dedicated to figure painting and portraits.

His early female figures were heavily influenced by the earthy palette and buxom figure types of Realist painter Gustave Courbet.

In the summer of 1869, Renoir painted for two months alongside Monet at La Grenouillère, a boating and bathing establishment outside Paris.

Their sketchlike technique of broad, loose brushstrokes and their brightened palette attempted to capture the effects of the sun streaming through the trees on the rippling water. This painting campaign catalyzed the development of the Impressionist aesthetic.

After several of his paintings were rejected by the Salon in the early 1870s, Renoir decided to join Monet in establishing an independent artist’s society.

The Impressionists, as they were called, sought to capture modern life and Renoir’s works from this period focused on everyday people, streets, and surroundings.

His most iconic painting from this period, Dance at the Moulin de la Galette (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), explores dappled light as it flutters over young Montmartre revelers flirting, drinking, and dancing.

Renoir’s penchant for portraiture attracted the attention of a range of patrons with avant-garde sensibilities. From the politically radical pastry cook Eugène Murer to the wealthy society lady Madame Georges Charpentier, Renoir painted all of his patrons with affectionate charm.

One of the most splendid and ambitious portraits Renoir ever realized, the painting of Marguerite Charpentier with her children blends a modern informality and intimacy with the compositional rigor of an old master portrait.

The painting also prominently displays the Charpentiers’ advanced taste for Japanese arts.

Portraiture sustained Renoir financially, especially after the Charpentier painting was exhibited at the 1879 Salon to great success. Renoir, in fact, met one of his best patrons, the banker Paul Bérard, at Mme Charpentier’s home.

They became very close-Renoir painted all of his children and visited the Bérards’ country house in Wargemont regularly, where he explored other genres such as seascapes and luxuriant still lifes.

With his newfound financial freedom, Renoir began to explore other artistic directions.

His doubts about the spontaneity and impermanence of the Impressionist aesthetic led him to refuse to participate in the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1878.

Instead, Renoir decided to look back to the old masters for an art of structure, craft, and permanence. His first painting in this vein, Luncheon of the Boating Party (Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., 1637), exhibits a new solidity and clarity in the depiction of the figures and their placement within space, especially when compared to the Moulin de la Galette. Renoir left for Italy in 1881 to continue his self-education in the "grandeur and simplicity of the ancient painters".

He returned enamored of Raphael and Pompeii and his figures consequently became more crisply drawn and sculptural in character.

By the late 1880s and early 1890s, Renoir had shifted his investigation of the old masters from linear classicism to the coloristic traditions of Titian and Rubens as well as the unabashedly sensual beauty of eighteenth-century French art. Young Girl Bathing exhibits this softened touch.

The figure’s amplitude, the way her hair blends into the lush landscape, her demure glance away from the viewer, and the caressing brushstrokes allude simultaneously to the figures of Rubens and Fragonard.

Renoir’s most important series of the decade came from an invitation by the French government to execute a painting for the Musée du Luxembourg, a new museum devoted to the work of living artists.

Renoir made five versions of "Two Young Girls at the Piano" for the Minister of Fine Arts to choose from; the version in the Metropolitan’s Robert Lehman Collection is one of the finest.

The subject of girls at a piano recalls eighteenth-century French genre scenes, especially those of Fragonard. Renoir had painted the subject several times before, most notably in a major portrait commission.

In the early twentieth century, despite old age and declining health, Renoir persisted in artistic experimentation. He took up sculpture, hiring a young assistant and collaborator, Richard Guino, to create models after his designs.

He continued to paint portraits and his Tilla Durieux is arguably the finest of his late portraits. The pyramidal composition, lavish costume, and textiles framing the sitter derive from Titian’s portraits, attesting to Renoir’s continued admiration of Renaissance art.

The warm, red tonalities and expansive sense of monumentality, however, are features of his late style. During this period, Renoir lived mostly in the south of France near the Mediterranean coast. His physical deterioration was the impetus for this change of climate, but Renoir was also drawn to an arcadian ideal of Mediterranean classicism in his art. This artistic preoccupation is nowhere more apparent then in his twentieth-century bathers.

The Rubenesque figures he had been painting reached a level of unprecedented exaggeration in the twentieth century, culminating in the massive Bathers at the Musée d’Orsay. Mary Cassatt infamously described these pictures as of "enormously fat red women with very small heads".

Nevertheless, their over-the-top vision of edenic plenitude was admired by Picasso, Henri Matisse and Aristide Maillol.

Renoir was celebrated in the early twentieth century as one of the greatest modern French painters, not just for his work as an Impressionist but also for the uncompromising aesthetic of his late works. | © Cindy Kang, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Renoir, Pierre-Auguste - Pittore (Limoges 1841 - Cagnes-sur-Mer 1919). Stabilitosi a Parigi con la famiglia (1844), dopo gli studî presso l'École de dessin et d'arts décoratifs e una parallela esperienza artigiana come decoratore, frequentò (1862-64) i corsi di M.-C.-G. Gleyre all'École des Beaux-Arts.

In quegli stessi anni visitò spesso il Louvre, eseguendo copie da Rubens e da maestri francesi del sec. 18°, e strinse amicizia con C. Monet, A. Sisley e J.-F. Bazille con i quali cominciò a dipingere all'aperto condividendo la ricerca di un più diretto approccio alla natura.

Nel 1864 fu ammesso per la prima volta al Salon (Esmeralda che danza, 1864, poi da lui stesso distrutta) ed ottenne commissioni per alcuni ritratti (Romain Lancaux, Cleveland, Museum of art); intensificò le sue ricerche en plein air dipingendo nei dintorni di Parigi e nella foresta di Fontainebleau (Lise con l'ombrellino, 1867, Essen, Folkwang Museum; I coniugi Sisley, 1868, Colonia, Wallraf-Richartz Museum).

Se alcune opere mostrano ancora influenze courbettiane (La locanda di Mère Antony, 1866, Stoccolma, Nationalmuseum) o di Delacroix (Donna d'Algeri, 1870, San Francisco, The fine arts museums), dal 1869 prevalse in Renoir l'interesse per lo studio della luce e della resa atmosferica; egli, infatti, predilesse dipingere paesaggi raggiungendo risultati di vibrante luminosità, in particolare, nelle opere eseguite a Croissy e ad Argenteuil, a stretto contatto con C. Monet (D'estate, 1869, Berlino, Nationalgalerie; Pont-Neuf, 1872, Washington, National Gallery; La Senna ad Argenteuil, 1874, Portland, Oregon Art Museum).

Nel 1874, alla prima mostra degli impressionisti Renoir espose, con altre tele, Il palco (1874, Londra, Courtauld Institute); quest'opera, costruita esclusivamente attraverso la modulazione dei rapporti cromatici, definì l'avvio di una ricerca che, rivolta a rappresentare lo spazio solo come luce e colore, giungerà quasi allo sfaldamento della forma (Donna con ombrellino e bambino, 1874, Boston, Museum of fine arts; Ballo al Moulin de la Galette, 1876, Parigi, Musée d'Orsay).

Nel 1879, Renoir disertò la quarta mostra degli impressionisti e presentò al Salon un'opera che tendeva a privilegiare il disegno e un'elaborazione più accurata, la grande tela Madame Charpentier con le figlie (1878, New York, Metropolitan Museum), che ottenne un grande successo di pubblico.

Il nuovo orientamento (manière aigre), elaborato anche attraverso numerosi schizzi preparatorî, si precisò dopo i viaggi in Algeria (1881) e in Italia (1881-82), stimolato in particolare dagli affreschi pompeiani e dalle opere di Raffaello: accanto a una libertà cromatica, che assunse tonalità più calde e luminose, il disegno si fece più nitido e più incisivo il trattamento della forma, filtrato anche attraverso l'esempio di Ingres, mentre una struttura più grandiosa e volumetrica caratterizza le ricorrenti figure femminili (La colazione dei canottieri, 1881, Washington, The Phillips Collection; Gli ombrelli, 1881-85, Londra, National Gallery; Bagnante seduta, 1883, Cambridge, Mass., Fogg art museum; Pomeriggio delle bambine a Wargemont, 1884, Berlino, National Galerie).

Dalla fine degli anni Ottanta, le sue opere sono segnate da maggiore libertà espressiva, arricchita, dopo un viaggio in Spagna nel 1892, di profonde suggestioni tratte da Goya e da Velázquez: Nel prato, 1890, Boston, Museum of fine arts; Fanciulle al piano, 1892, Parigi, Musée d'Orsay. A Cagnes, dal 1905, seppur affetto da una grave forma di reumatismo che finì per paralizzargli le dita, Renoir continuò a dipingere (Vigneti a Cagnes, 1908, New York, The Brooklyn museum; Tilla Durieux, 1914, New York, Metropolitan Museum; Bagnanti, 1918-19, Parigi, Musée d'Orsay).

Dopo il 1907, si dedicò anche alla scultura realizzando, con l'aiuto di un giovane apprendista, grandi figure modellati con ampiezza di piani (Venere vincitrice, 1914, Londra, National Gallery). | © Treccani