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Pierre
Auguste Renoir, the genius and traditionalist of the Impressionist
movement, and a follower in the grand line of Titian, Tintoretto,
Rubens, Fragonard, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, and Ingres, was born
in Limoges, the son of a tailor. Renoir began his career by painting
porcelain plates, fans, and window blinds, before entering the Académie
Gleyre in 1862. |
His
meeting with Claude Monet,
Alfred Sisley,
and Frederic Bazille and their removal to Fountainbleau to paint from
nature brought him into the heart of the Impressionist movement, although
his paintings before 1870 were in the classical tradition and show
the influences of Courbet, Corot, Delacroix, and Manet. Between 1870
and 1880, Renoir was a pure Impressionist, painting with the characteristic
touches of broken color and in exquisite hues. Unlike his companions,
he preferred figure painting to landscapes and created portraits and
scenes of social life in a manner that is at once joyously alive,
tender, and sensuous. By 1880, Renoir felt that he could go no further
as an Impressionist, and in 1881 he went to Italy, staying at first
in Venice, next in Rome where he studied Raphael's frescoes, and finally
in Naples and Pompeii. Upon his return to France, Renoir decided that
he knew nothing about drawing or the rendering of form and began to
copy the works of Ingres and Renaissance bas-reliefs. He also spent
considerable time with Paul
Cezanne. His own work took on an
acid tone, a hard line, a smooth flat texture, and an attention to
form rather than color-a manner he himself called aigre (sour or acid).
From this period came the great series of "Bathers" (ca.
1895).
His final style, derived from previous
experiments, combines line and color, volume and light, a delight
in plastic values that derives in part from the paganism of the ancient
Greeks, and an optimistic outlook on life. His paintings glorify women.
He loved their beauty and their gentleness, their laughter and their
gravity, their tenderness and their coquetry. This same understanding
applies to his paintings of children whom he painted with an eye for
their naturalness and simplicity. Renoir's love of painting was so
great, that even in his final years, confined to bed with brushes
bound to his crippled, arthritic wrists, he produced Olympian canvases
with resonant colors.
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