Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919)
Best known for his Impressionist and Post-Impressionist figure and landscape painting, Renoir began painting porcelain at a young age, perhaps influenced by his upbringing in Limoges, France. This experience left a certain trace on his later art, which was always somewhat decorative in nature despite his later interest in realism. He was friends and colleagues with other masters of French painting such as Monet, Sisley, and Basille, and later Pissarro and Cezanne. After a long career painting in the Impressionistic style, he began what is known as his “dry style” which was essentially a search for solid form and a more stable composition. This led him to examine the masters of the Renaissance, and even later, a focus on the nude figure. A focus on nudes in sunlight continued toward the end of his life and his completion of his large-scale composition The Great Bathers (The Nymphs) which was terribly painful for him due to acute arthritis.
