Renoir was the famous painter and sculptor of the French immpressionist. At the early stage, there was an intimate connection between his works and impressionism and his earlier works were the typical impressionist ones recording the real life. However, in the middle of 1880s, he split himself from impressionism and switched to character portrait and portraits, especially the female portrait, from which he tried to develop his more rigid and regular painting skill.
Pierre Auguste Renoir was born in a poor tailor’s family in Limoges. At the age of five, he moved into Paris with his family. At the age of thirteen, he mastered the craft of drawing paintings on porcelain. In 1870s, Renoir often went out with Monet to paint from nature and swaped painting skills, especially how to paint with lights and colors.
In 1874, Renoir was invited to the first impressionist painting exhibition with his painting The Theater Box, which symbolized the mature of Renoir’s painting style. Later, in 1876, he Renoir demonstrated the grand spectacle with this method in his another painting The Ball at the Moulin de la Galette. The random sunspots through the trees scattered upto people’s body, face, tables and grassland, which really effectuated impressionist slogan “light is the master of paintings”. This was the important representation of impressionism at the aspect of the convention. It seemingly depicted the lively and merry atmosphere of a famous outdoor cafe in Pairs, but factually its real subject is the sunlight through the trees. Casted upon a human body, the sunlight brought about rich light effects, which fully demonstrated impressionist painter’s heightened sensitivity about the light and color effects.
Since 1876, his painting style had been forstered towards ripeness. The representative works in this style such as Luncheon of the Boating Party, Two Sisters (On the Terrace) all were celebrated by Critics and Official Salon for their bright, colorful and dizzling lights and colors. Accompanied with success in his career, his living conditions have also achieved great improvement, so he decided to leave France for the eastern countries in order to pursue new subject matters and inspirations. He has traveled to many places, such as Algeria, Uk, Florence, Venice, Rome and other places of interests in Italy. At the sight of Raphael’s paintings in Rome, he exclaimed, “Wonderful! I should have seen them earlier.” Then, his artistic pursuit went back to the classical academism. He once said, “I prefer Angell’s oil paintings.” This is a crisis in his artistic pursuit, but even in such a crisis, he still kept his impressionist spirit in all his lanscape paintings.
Sunshine, air, nature, women, flowers, and children were the very subjects Renoir painted with rich colors in his span. Although all his life had been spent in poverty, all his paintings were sweet and bright. In his paintings, with a vein of melancholy in their eyes, all women were plump, beautiful and attractive; all the children were pure and simple. Such a great master at figure paintings caught rheumatism in his later life. Althoug his hands and feet became deformed and great pain seized him, he still kept drawing paintings.
Among all the impressionist painters, Renoir maybe the most popular one, because all his subjects were lovely children, flowers, beautiful scenery, and especially the pretty women, which would definitely attract all the audiences’ attentions. Renoir painted all the delight and pleasure he found from the above-mentioned subjects directly on his canvas. He had once said, “Why cannot art equal beauty? There are enough terreible and ugly things in the world.” He was also an admirer of female images and once expressed, “I cannot finish the portrait until I feel that I can touch the image in the painting.”
Among the impressionist group, Renoir was the youngest one, one year younger than Monet. In most works of this artist, young housewives were described in lucid, lively, and warm tones, espcially their naked images. With special traditional skills, he painted their soft, elastic skin and plump body. Although he had painted many paintings about landscapes and innocent images of children, the naked and female images dominated his works. Comparied with the pretentious and hypocratical pursuit of the previous painters in other schools, his body paintings were filled with a happiness and youthful spirit. All of them were like Eve in the garden of Eden, who never tried the forbidden fruit. They’re so leisure and so charming.
