Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born on February 25, 1841, in Limoges, a city in central France long associated with porcelain manufacture. He was one of several children of Léonard Renoir, a tailor, and Marguerite Merlet, a seamstress. In 1844 the family moved to Paris in search of better prospects, settling near the Louvre, and the boy grew up in the crowded streets of the old city center ^[1].

Money was tight, so Renoir left school early. At thirteen he was apprenticed to a porcelain workshop, where he painted flowers, portraits, and decorative scenes onto cups and plates. The work taught him precise brush handling and a taste for luminous, high-keyed color that never left him. When industrial printing methods undercut hand-painted porcelain around 1858, he lost the trade and turned to painting fans, blinds, and religious hangings to earn a living ^[2].

During these years he spent free hours copying old masters in the Louvre, drawn especially to eighteenth-century French painters such as Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard. Their gallantry and soft flesh tones shaped his ambitions. Determined to become a serious painter, he saved enough to enroll in 1862 at the École des Beaux-Arts and in the independent teaching studio of Charles Gleyre ^[1].

Gleyre's studio proved decisive, though not because of the teaching. There Renoir met Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Frédéric Bazille, young painters equally restless with academic convention. The friends painted together outdoors in the forest of Fontainebleau and along the Seine, working quickly to catch changing light, an approach that would soon define a movement ^[2].

The 1860s were hard. Renoir had a few canvases accepted at the official Salon, including a large portrait of his companion Lise Tréhot, but sales were rare and he sometimes relied on Bazille and Monet for food and lodging. His service during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 interrupted his work; Bazille was killed in the fighting, a loss that marked the surviving circle ^[1].

In the summer of 1869 Renoir and Monet set up their easels side by side at La Grenouillère, a bathing spot on the Seine near Bougival. The rapid, broken brushwork and shimmering water in the studies they produced there are often described by historians as a founding moment of Impressionism ^[3]. Five years later, in April 1874, Renoir joined Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot, and others in the first independent group exhibition in Paris, the show that gave the movement its name. He contributed works including La Loge, a theater-box scene now in the Courtauld Gallery in London ^[3].

Among Pierre-Auguste Renoir achievements, the great figure paintings of the 1870s and early 1880s hold first place. Bal du moulin de la Galette, painted in 1876 and now in the Musée d'Orsay, captures a Sunday dance in Montmartre with dappled sunlight falling across a crowd of working-class Parisians. Its scale and ambition set it apart from the smaller landscape sketches of his colleagues ^[4].

Luncheon of the Boating Party, completed in 1881 and held by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., gathers his friends on a restaurant terrace at Chatou beside the Seine. Among the models is Aline Charigot, the young seamstress he would later marry, shown at the left playing with a small dog ^[5]. The picture is widely treated as a summation of Impressionist figure painting: informal, sociable, and saturated with light.

Renoir also prospered as a portraitist. Through the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel and patrons such as the publisher Georges Charpentier, he received commissions from prosperous Parisian families, and his 1878 portrait of Madame Charpentier with her children was well received at the Salon of 1879 ^[1]. A journey to Italy in 1881 and 1882 changed his course. Confronted with Raphael and the frescoes of Pompeii, he came to feel he had neglected drawing and structure. The crisp, linear manner that followed, sometimes called his Ingres or dry period, produced works such as The Umbrellas and the Grandes Baigneuses of 1887 before he relaxed again into warmer, softer handling ^[2].

Renoir met Aline Charigot around 1880, when she was in her early twenties and modeling for him. Their first son, Pierre, was born in 1885, and the couple married in 1890. Two more sons followed: Jean in 1894 and Claude, called Coco, in 1901 ^[1]. Pierre became a noted stage and film actor, and Jean Renoir grew into one of the most admired film directors of the twentieth century, later publishing an affectionate memoir of his father, Renoir, My Father, in 1962 ^[6].

By most accounts Renoir was sociable, unpretentious, and wary of theory. He liked to say he painted for pleasure and distrusted grand programs, preferring the company of models, family, and a small circle of friends that included Monet, Cézanne, and the collector and dealer Ambroise Vollard, who published an early biography of him ^[7].

Gabrielle Renard, a cousin of Aline hired as a nursemaid for Jean in 1894, became one of his most frequent models over the following two decades. The household moved gradually south as the painter's health declined, and Aline's death in 1915, while two of their sons were recovering from war wounds, was a heavy blow to him ^[6].

From the late 1890s Renoir suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis, which progressively deformed his hands and eventually confined him to a wheelchair. Seeking a gentler climate, he settled in 1907 at Les Collettes, a farm planted with ancient olive trees at Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera. The property is preserved today as the Musée Renoir ^[8].

He refused to stop working. With bandaged hands and brushes wedged between stiffened fingers, he painted daily, turning out bathers, roses, and portraits in a late style of ample forms and hot reds and oranges. In these years he also took up sculpture, directing young assistants, most notably Richard Guino, who modeled clay under his instruction to produce works such as the large Venus Victrix ^[2].

Recognition kept pace. His paintings entered major museums during his lifetime, and in 1919, months before his death, he was made an officer of the Legion of Honor and visited the Louvre to see his portrait of Madame Charpentier hanging there ^[1]. He died at Les Collettes on December 3, 1919, at the age of 78, and was buried beside Aline at Essoyes, her home village in the Aube ^[8].

Renoir left an enormous body of work, commonly estimated at several thousand paintings produced across roughly six decades ^[2]. Major holdings can be seen at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (which owns more than 180 of his canvases, the largest single collection), the National Gallery in London, and The Phillips Collection in Washington ^[9].

His market standing has matched his fame. Au Moulin de la Galette, a smaller version of the Orsay dance scene, sold at Sotheby's in New York in May 1990 for 78.1 million dollars, at the time among the highest prices ever paid for a painting at auction ^[10]. Museum retrospectives, including the large 1985 exhibition shared by London, Paris, and Boston, have kept his work before a broad public.

Critical opinion has been less uniform. Some modern writers find the late nudes repetitive or saccharine, while others, following artists such as Matisse and Picasso, who admired and collected him, treat the late work as a bridge from Impressionism to twentieth-century figuration ^[2]. Basic Pierre-Auguste Renoir facts, from the porcelain apprenticeship to the arthritic final decades at Cagnes, recur in every serious Pierre-Auguste Renoir biography because they explain the art: a craftsman's discipline joined to a lifelong insistence that painting should give delight.