French Impressionist artist, one of the foremost artists of his time and of the Impressionist movement. He is best known for lush, colorful, joyful portraits of children as well as landscapes, women and nudes of great sensual power. On display in museums throughout the world, his principle works include, “The Luncheon of the Boating Party,” 1881, “Dance at Bougival,” 1883 and “Bather,” 1918.
Renoir was the sixth child and only son of tailor Leonard Renoir and dressmaker Marguerite Merlet. Moving to Paris at age four, he spent his spare time in his father’s shop drawing on walls and floors with tailor’s chalk. Upon leaving school at 13 he was apprenticed as a painter of porcelain at the firm of Levy Freres. When the firm went bankrupt in 1858, he secured work painting blinds and fans.
On 1/24/1860, he was granted permission to copy art in the Louvre where he remained for four diligent years. In 1862 he was studying with Charles Gabriel Gleyre, whose studio was part of Ecole des Beaux Arts and who introduced him to fellow impressionist artists. By 1870 he was earning his living as a portrait painter and had managed to cultivate a circle of admirers who were powerful in banking, business and publishing who liked his work and liked the kind, congenial artist himself. One of these individuals was Georges Charpentier and his wife Mme. Charpentier, whose salon was the center of artistic and intellectual life in Paris at that time. Renoir’s portrait of her and her children was given a central position at the Salon of 1879 and he immediately became an artist of importance. Principle art dealers began buying his work and a flow of steady patrons followed.
Lacking classical training, Renoir traveled to Italy in 1881-1882 to study art, and was most influenced by the eighteenth century Rococo masters, especially Boucher. With him came his one-time laundress, model and mistress, Aline Charigot. When he returned to Paris with a successful exhibition of a colder, more classical style, the show was such a huge success it established him financially.
By the end of the decade Renoir was enjoying his position as one of the most beloved artists of the century painting shopgirls, milliners, seamstresses, streets, the Seine and the forests and fields of suburban Paris. Known for his high strung, nervous temperament, he was eternally seeking to perfect his style. “I have seen the Raphael’s in Rome. They are wonderful and I should have seen them before. They are full of knowledge and wisdom. Unlike me, he did not seek the impossible. I am still suffering from experimenting. I’m not content and I an scraping off, still scraping off. I hope this craze will end. I am like a child in school. The white page must always be neatly written and bang!-a blot. I am still at the age of blots – and I’m forty.”
Gradually Renoir began to suffer from rheumatism which crippled him for the last 20 years of his life. Seeking a milder climate, he moved from Paris to the medieval Province village of Cagnes in 1903, where he built a house next to a grove of olive trees that dated from Roman times. Now crippled and confined to a wheelchair from rheumatism, he was wheeled and carried to various sites and painted with brushes attached to his hands.
Renoir married his lover Aline Charigot on 4/14/1890. They had three sons, Pierre, born 3/21/1885, Jean, born 9/15/1894 and Claude, born 8/04/1901.
He died of lung congestion at his home in Cagnes on 12/17/1919.
Link to Wikipedia biography