Alon Zakaim Fine Art

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France in 1841. As the son of a working class family, he worked in a porcelain factory where he was chosen to paint designs on china. Even during those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.

In 1862 Renoir began studying art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts under Parisunder Charles Gleyre. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frederic Bazille, and Claude Monet. In these early years, his work showed the influence of the colourism of Eugène Delacroix and the luminosity of Camille Corot. He also admired the realism of Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet.

In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water in the open air, he and Claude Monet discovered that the colour of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected colour of the objects surrounding them. Together with their contemporaries, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille , Monet and Renoir pioneered the Impressionist style, painting snap shot scenes of real life, painted in open air with hasty, textured brush strokes that sparkled with colour and light. As the technique became increasingly popular with their contemporaries, the impressionist’s held their first exhibition in 1874, which featured 6 of Renoir’s works.

By the mid-1880s, Renoir broke with the impressionist movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women. This change largely came about after he travelled to look at the works of the artists whom he greatly admired. In 1881 he travelled to Algeria, a country he associated with Eugène Delacroix, and then to Madrid to see the work of Diego Velázquez. He then went on to Italy to look at the work of Titian, Raphael and other Renaissance masters in Florence and Rome. It was his study of these masters which convinced him to change his path and for the next several years he painted in a more severe style, attempting to return to classicism.

In 1890, Renoir married Aline Victorine Charigot, who, along with a number of the artist's friends, had already served as a model for Les Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881). After his marriage, Renoir changed direction again, and returned to the use of thinly brushed colour which dissolved outlines as in his earlier work. From this period onwards he concentrated on monumental nudes and domestic scenes, particularly of his is wife and family.

Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. Despite this he continued to paint during the last twenty years of his life, even when arthritis severely limited his movement. In the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers. In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters, he died in the same year.

Pierre - Auguste Renoir left behind several thousand paintings. The pleasance and sensuality of his painting has made it some of the most well-known and frequently-reproduced works in the history of art.

Most recently the exhibition 'Renoir Landscapes 1865-1883' at London’s National Gallery, (spring 2007) has brought to attention Renoirs vast collection of landscapes. It is the first exhibition to examine this vital aspect of Renoir's achievement, and brings together some 70 landscapes. Renoir believed that landscape painting was the only true way to develop as a painter, partly because one was forced to use colours and tones that the constrained lighting of a studio did not afford. ‘Saules et personnages dans une barque’ displays the loose, light and pleasantly hazy style that Renoir achieved through painting in open air, during the keys years of his association with the impressionist style.

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