Pierre Auguste Renoir 1841 - 1919

Renoir was born at Limoges on February 25, 1841. He died at Cagnes on December 3, 1919. The story of Renoir’s life would deserve to be the subject of an Epinal picture, with its toil, its predestination, its strife, its disappointments and success. He lived long and had many children.

Born into a family of modest means, and even poor, it is said, he became apprenticed to a porcelain-maker in Paris (rue du Temple) in 1854, and his early bent for drawing gave promise that he would be a decorator. Having learned to make bouquets of flowers, he then became a painter of fans, ornaments, sacred subjects, and screens destined for religious purposes. The good worker having thus saved some money, he was able to pay for some real lessons from real artists and in 1862, entered Gleyre’s studio, where he met Monet, Sisley and Bazille. During the same period, he made the acquaintance of Pissarro and Cezanne, who were both going to the Swiss Academy. Thus, well before the 1874 Exhibition the Impressionist team was made up. Renoir’s pictures were severely criticized at the time of the first exhibition, yet he was one of the first to know the collector’s confidence, notably that of Georges Charpentier who, having one of his canvasses at the sale held in 1875, from the following year onwards, gave him commission to paint portraits of his family.

One is astonished today that works like “La Loge,” 1874, and “Le Moulin de la Galette,” 1876, did not immediately gain the public’s unanimous approval. By 1880 Renoir had almost won the day. From then on he was regularly received at the Salon and had small inclination for revolutionary movements.

In 1881, he left for Italy, and returned in 1882; during these travels, Raphael exerted a strong influence on him which was to last for several years and drove him to adopt a more precise style of drawing accentuating the outline of forms. This has been called his Ingres period because renouncing the Impressionist play of colors. Like Ingres he modeled his figures by blending colors and not by contrasting them. He protracted this experiment until around 1890, and then without turning back to Impressionist techniques, he found a freer way of painting in which his temperament expressed itself unrestrainedly. To his last day, Renoir’s happy art was to give no indication of the physical suffering of a man rendered more and more paralytic by rheumatism. His children, his wife, and especially, his servant Gabrielle, served him as models, in addition to flowers and the Mediterranean landscapes, particularly those in the vicinity of Cagnes , where he settled in 1903 and where he spent most of his remaining years.