Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 – 1919), commonly known as Auguste Renoir, was a leading painter in developing the Impressionist style.

As one who celebrated beauty and especially feminine sensuality, Renoir’s paintings are notable for their vibrant light and saturated color, most often focusing on people in intimate and candid compositions.

In characteristic Impressionist style, Renoir suggested a scene’s details through freely brushed touches of color so that his figures softly fuse with their surroundings.

At the age of 51, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis, which severely limited his mobility in his last twenty years of his life.

He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to change his painting technique.

Renoir remained positive and passionate about his art and did not let his condition affect his painting or diminish the beauty that he saw around him. In his arthritis’s advanced stages, he required an assistant to place his paintbrush in his hand.

His hands were also wrapped with bandages to prevent skin irritation. Renoir applied various effective coping strategies and used his ingenuity to come up with different ways to continue painting even as his arthritis weakened him.

Renoir was a prolific artist who created several thousand paintings. The single most extensive collection of his works, about 181 pictures, is part of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

A Virtual Tour of Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette
Dance at Bougival
The Large Bathers
The Theater Box
Collette’s House in Cagnes
Luncheon of the Boating Party
In Summer
Country Dance
Two Sisters
Portrait of Misia Godebska-Sert
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
La Grenouillère (Nationalmuseum)
La Grenouillère
Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil
Mother and Children (La Promenade)

Name: Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Born: 1841 – Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France
Died: 1919 (aged 78) – Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France
Nationality: French
Movement: Impressionism

Highlights of Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette

“Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette” is also known as “Bal du Moulin de la Galette” and is one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s most famous works.

The Moulin de la Galette was an outdoor dancehall and café, frequented by many of Renoir’s friends. Renoir was a regular, and he enjoyed the atmosphere.

The Moulin de la Galette was one of the several windmills located in Montmartre, a Paris district. The painting depicts a famous Parisian lifestyle during a typical Sunday afternoon in the late 1870s, when working-class Parisians would dress up and spend time dancing, drinking, and eating into the evening.

Dance at Bougival

“Dance at Bougival” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, made in 1883, depicts two of Renoir’s friends dancing at one of the open-air cafés of suburban Bougival on the Seine outside Paris.

Renoir used intense color and lush brushwork to heighten the sense of pleasure conveyed by the whirling couple who dominate the painting.

The woman’s face, framed by her red bonnet and is the focus of attention. The woman’s body is arched to the dance as she turns her head and looks away, delighted with the pleasure she inspires in her dance partner and herself. Her dress swirls to the rhythms of the dance.

The Large Bathers

“The Large Bathers” or “Les Grandes Baigneuses” by Auguste Renoir depicts a scene of nude women bathing. The figures have a sculptural quality, while the landscape behind them is bathed in an impressionist light.

This painting was a new style for Renoir, who sought to reconcile the modern topics and painting styles with the 17th and 18th-century art traditions.

Renoir admired Rubens, Titian, and Raphael’s works, and he was trying to find an integrated form of the old masters and the new impressionist style.

The Theater Box

“The Theater Box” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, also knew by its French name “La Loge,” shows a couple in their theater box.

At the time of this painting, the theater in Paris was a rapidly expanding form of entertainment and culture. The theater was a prominent place to meet people and to be seen.

Wealth and fashion were on parade. In this painting, Renoir focused upon the theater scene as a social stage where status and relationships were on public display.

Portrait of Misia Godebska-Sert

“Portrait of Misia Godebska-Sert” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir shows Misia Sert, née Godebska, a notable figure in the circle of artists in Paris at the turn of the century.

She first married in 1903, and later she married the Spanish painter José Maria Sert, and it is as Misia Sert that she is most remembered.

Misia Sert (1872 – 1950) was a Polish descent pianist who hosted an artistic salon in Paris and was a patron and friend to numerous artists.

Renoir Misia Godebska

Collette’s House in Cagnes

“Collette’s House in Cagnes” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir was painted by Renoir at the age of just over 70-year-old when Renoir lived at a farm on the hill Les Collettes in Cagnes-sur-Mer, the area he lived in until his death.

Renoir died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, seven years after this painting. Renoir’s paintings are notable for their light and color, as in this painting.

The warmth of Renoir’s style made his paintings some of the most famous works in the history of art. Renoir uses the trees as a visual screen to integrate the foreground and background space.

Renoir - La casa de Colletes en Cagnes

Luncheon of the Boating Party

“Luncheon of the Boating Party” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts a group of Renoir’s friends relaxing on a balcony at the Maison Fournaise restaurant, along the Seine river in Chatou, France. All of the figures in the painting have been identified, and their names are known.

Renoir’s future wife, Aline Chariot, is in the foreground playing with a small dog.

Auguste Renoir - Luncheon of the Boating Party

In Summer

“In Summer” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir is a portrait of twenty-year-old Lise Tréhot, who was Renoir’s companion from about 1866 to 1871.

He painted her at least 23 times, including Lise, with a parasol, painted in 1867, which was Renoir’s first significant critical success at the Paris Salon in 1868. This success inspired Renoir to repaint her, this time in a more informal and intimate style.

Country Dance

“Country Dance” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir shows a dancing couple under a chestnut tree. Both figures are painted life-size and occupy almost the entire painting.

The woman who holds a fan in her right hand is shown with a smiling face looking towards the viewer. The scene is bathed in a bright and cheerful light.

The background includes a table on the right. A hat on the ground and a pair of faces below the dance floor level can be seen.

Two Sisters

Two Sisters or On the Terrace by Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts the upper terrace of the Maison Fournaise, a family restaurant located on an island in the Seine in Chatou, the western suburb of Paris.

The painting shows a young woman and her younger girl seated outdoors with a small basket containing wool balls. In the background over the railings of the terrace are flowering plants and vines.

Further in the background is the River Seine with boats and some buildings in the top left on the other side of the river.

La Grenouillère (Nationalmuseum)

“La Grenouillère” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts La Grenouillère, a popular middle-class resort consisting of a spa, a boating establishment, and a floating café.

Monet and Renoir recognized in La Grenouillère an ideal subject for the images of leisure they hoped would sell.

The famous floating café “La Grenouillère” is where Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir met at the end of the summer of 1869 to paint their first Impressionist paintings. Museum: Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

La Grenouillère

“La Grenouillère” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts the La Grenouillère resort promoted as “Trouville-sur-Seine,” located on the Seine near Bougival, easily accessible by train from Paris and had just been favored with a visit by Emperor Napoleon III with his wife and son.

Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil

“Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir depicts Monet’s famous impressionist at his painting easel painting in his garden in Argenteuil.

From 1871 to 1878, Claude Monet lived at Argenteuil, a village on the right bank of the Seine river near Paris, and a popular Sunday-outing destination for Parisians, where he painted some of his best-known works.

Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted their first Impressionist paintings together at La Grenouillère in 1869 when they were both impoverished artists.

This painting of Monet by Renior was rendered four years later as they continued to struggle for recognition.

One year after this painting, their fortunes reached a turning-point as the two friends came together with others for the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris. Museum: Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Mother and Children (La Promenade)

“Mother and Children” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir shows a mother who gently guides her two daughters along a circling path in a public park. Together they form a triangular group set apart from the background figures and foliage.

The symmetry in the arrangement of the three blond figures lends a note of elegance. The mother and daughters are turned slightly to the right as they walk along the path.

The young girls are dressed alike and similarly posed. The elder seems more self-confident as she strides forward ahead of her mother, holding her doll in her clasped hands. The mother reassures the younger girl with her hand to her shoulder.

The background figures in the extreme upper right of the scene provide perspective and depth without taking the focus off the central group.

The greens and lavenders of the landscape are echoes of the turquoise and creamy white of the girls’ costumes and the rich blue of their mother’s jacket.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir Quotes

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“The more they measure, the more they realize how much the Greeks departed from regular and banal lines to produce their effect.”

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“Why should beauty be suspect?”

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“There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need to manufacture more.”

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“One must, from time to time, attempt things that are beyond one’s capacity.”

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I think I’m beginning to learn something about it.”

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“There’s nothing more absurd than a “connoisseur.”

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“You come to nature with all your theories, and she knocks them all flat.”

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“The pain passes, but the beauty remains.”

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“When I’ve painted a woman’s bottom so that I want to touch it, then the painting is finished.”

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“It is after you have lost your teeth that you can afford to buy steaks.”

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“Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.”

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“It’s with my brush that I make love.”

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“We are in a period of searchers rather than of creators.”

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If it [dabbling in art] didn’t amuse me, I beg you to believe that I wouldn’t do it.

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“Art is about emotion; if art needs to be explained, it is no longer art.”

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“I have been for forty years, discovering that the queen of all colors was black.”

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“What seems most significant to me about our movement [Impressionism] is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story.”

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“I have arrived more definitely than any other painter during his lifetime; honors shower upon me from every side; artists pay me compliments on my work; there are many people to whom my position must seem enviable. But I don’t seem to have a single real friend!”

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“The advantage of growing old is that you become aware of your mistakes more quickly.”

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God, the king of artists, was clumsy.

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Why should beauty be suspect?

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They tell you that a tree is only a combination of chemical elements. I prefer to believe that God created it and that a nymph inhabits it.

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