Pierre-Auguste Renoir

born Limoges 1841, died Cagnes 1919

At age thirteen Renoir was apprenticed to porcelain painters in Paris, where his family had moved in 1844. He worked for a manufacturer of window blinds and other decorative objects in 1858 and in 1860 applied for and received permission to copy paintings in the Louvre.

In 1862 he entered both the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the studio of Charles Gleyre (1808–1874), where he met such other progressively minded painters as Frédéric Bazille (1841–1870), Alfred Sisley, and Claude Monet. They painted together during the summers in the forest of Fontainebleau.

Renoir showed in the Impressionist exhibitions of 1874, 1876, 1877, and 1882, but he was also a faithful adherent of the classical tradition and submitted to the Salon regularly. His primary subject matter was the figure, and he experimented with portraits, genre-like scenes, and images of female bathers.

In the early 1880s he traveled to Italy, North Africa, and the South of France. The Renaissance art and the light of the south prompted him to adopt a brighter, warmer palette, giving increased emphasis to line and structure.

Increasingly crippled with arthritis, he wintered in the South of France, and in 1907 he bought property in Cagnes.

Source: Monet and the Impressionists exhibition catalogue:
Shackelford, George T M. Monet and the Impressionists.
Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008

Learn more in the exhibition:
> Monet's early career
> Early Impressionism
> The triumph of Impressionism: the 1880s
> Impressionism after 1900

Works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the exhibition

Woman with a parasol and small child on a sunlit hillside  c1874–76, Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; bequest of John T Spaulding

The Seine at Chatou  1881, Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: gift of Arthur Brewster Emmons

Small Venus victorious  1913  Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Bronze. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: William Francis Warden Fund