Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born on 25 February 1841 in Limoges, the son of a tailor, and moved with his family to Paris at the age of three. At thirteen he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter, where he developed the exceptional manual dexterity and feel for translucent color that would define his entire career. He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1862 and the studio of Charles Gleyre, where he met Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille — the nucleus of what would become the Impressionist movement. The four friends painted together at the Forest of Fontainebleau, developing the plein-air approach to light and color that the Salon consistently rejected. Renoir's breakthrough came in 1874, when he exhibited at the first Impressionist show, and more decisively in 1876 with La Loge — a painting of a woman in a theater box that combines Impressionist brushwork with an almost erotic physicality — and above all in 1876–77 with Bal du moulin de la Galette. This large canvas, painted from life on Sunday afternoons at the Moulin de la Galette dance hall in Montmartre, depicts the dappled sunlight falling through acacia trees onto dancing couples, and it is perhaps the most purely joyful large painting of the nineteenth century. His method was to set up his canvas in the open air, hire friends as models, and work directly from observation — but he was never a pure plein-air painter, always composing his scenes with conscious artifice. In the early 1880s, a crisis of confidence pushed him toward a drier, more classical style, influenced by a trip to Italy in 1881 where he spent weeks studying Raphael at the Vatican. The Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881) marks the hinge between his Impressionist warmth and his new-found interest in clearer contour. By the mid-1890s he had returned to a looser, more fleshy manner, painting nudes and domestic scenes with an almost sculptural roundness. In 1897 he fell from his bicycle and broke his right arm; the injury, combined with the rheumatoid arthritis that had plagued him since 1888, gradually crippled his hands. By the early 1900s he had the brushes strapped to his arthritic fingers, yet he continued to paint prolific canvases of nudes, roses, and his estate at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France. He died on 3 December 1919, in his house at Cagnes, reportedly saying after finishing a painting of flowers: 'I think I am beginning to understand something about it.' He had been working until hours before his death.
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Impressionist painter · Bal du moulin de la Galette · Celebrant of Parisian life
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
1,841 CE – 1,919 CE
The Limoges-born painter who turned the surfaces of Impressionism into pure luminous pleasure, capturing sunlight on skin and Sunday afternoons in Paris.
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