Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born 178 years ago this week, on 25th February 1841, was a French Impressionist painter whose eye for beauty made him one of the movement’s most popular practitioners. He is best known for his paintings of bustling Parisian modernity and leisure in the last three decades of the 19th century. Though celebrated as a colourist with a keen eye for capturing the movement of light and shadow, Renoir started to explore Renaissance painting in the middle of his career, which led him to integrate more line and composition into his mature works and create some of his era’s most evocative paintings.
In 1862, he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet. Recognition was slow in coming for Renoir, partly as a result of the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War, and, at times, during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint, but his first success came at the Salon of 1868 with his painting Lise with a Parasol, which depicted Lise Tréhot, his lover at the time.
Renoir was inspired by the style and subject matter of previous modern painters Camille Pissarro and Édouard Manet. After a series of rejections by the Salon juries, he joined forces with Monet, Sisley, Pissarro, and several other artists to mount the First Impressionist Exhibition in April 1874, in which Renoir displayed six paintings. Although the critical response to the exhibition was not enthusiastic, Renoir’s work was well received.
Hoping to secure a livelihood by attracting portrait commissions, Renoir displayed mostly portraits at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876. He contributed a more diverse range of paintings the next year when the group presented its Third Exhibition; they included Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette and The Swing.
Renoir did not exhibit in the fourth or fifth Impressionist exhibitions, and instead resumed submitting his works to the Salon, the more conventional outlet for new art. By the end of the 1870s, particularly after the success of his painting Mme Charpentier and her Children at the Salon of 1879, Renoir was a successful and fashionable painter.
In 1890, he married Aline Victorine Charigot, a dressmaker twenty years his junior, who, along with a number of the artist’s friends, had already served as a model for Le Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party; she is the woman on the left playing with the dog) and with whom he had already had a child, Pierre.
After marrying, 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: Pierre Renoir, who became a stage and film actor; Jean Renoir, who became a noted filmmaker; and Claude Renoir, who became a cinematographer
This documentary, made in 1999 by Lara Lowe for Cromwell Films supplies much more information about this most popular and identifiable Impressionist.
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