Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Style and technique

Renoir is the most immediately pleasing of the Impressionists, and this has occasionally been used against him. His subjects — dances, lunches on the river, couples in café gardens, children with cats, women's skin in dappled summer light — are chosen for their inherent attractiveness, and he renders them with a warmth of colour and a looseness of touch that makes every canvas feel like a warm afternoon.

This was a deliberate philosophy, not an absence of seriousness. He believed that painting should give pleasure; he was explicitly contemptuous of the idea that difficulty or discomfort were marks of artistic merit. 'For me, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty!' he reportedly said. He was working against the tradition of moral earnestness in French painting that ran from David through Géricault to Courbet.

His technique in the Impressionist years (roughly 1867–1883) used dappled light as a primary compositional device: the small broken patches of shadow and light that flickering sun through leaves creates on skin and clothing. His outdoor figures are painted in this interrupted light — not uniformly lit but covered in small shifting patches of warm yellow and cool blue-violet shadow.

The late nudes — the 'Grand Bathers' of 1887, painted over three years of preparation, and the final 'Bathers' of 1919, painted when his hands were so crippled by rheumatoid arthritis that he strapped the brush to his wrist — are the most fully realised statements of his mature philosophy: the nude female figure as the primary subject of painting, rendered with warm, high-keyed colour and a simplified drawing that approaches the decorative without losing the physical.

Life and legacy

Renoir was born on 25 February 1841 in Limoges, a city in central France famous for its porcelain manufacture. His father was a tailor of modest means and the family moved to Paris when Renoir was four. He left school at thirteen to apprentice as a porcelain painter — a trade that required precisely the kind of controlled, delicate brushwork on a smooth curved surface that would later characterise his mature painting style.

He saved enough to enrol at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1862 and entered the studio of the academic painter Charles Gleyre, where he met Monet, Sisley, and Bazille — the friendships that would shape his career. From 1864 he began painting outdoors with Monet, working side by side at La Grenouillère on the Seine in 1869 and producing two paintings that are among the founding documents of Impressionist technique.

His career before and after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 was financially precarious. He was exempted from service due to poor health, but the war disrupted the social life of Paris that was his subject matter. After the war, the development of the independent Impressionist movement — which he helped found and for which he organised exhibitions — gave him a platform.

'Moulin de la Galette' (1876) and 'Luncheon of the Boating Party' (1881) are his two major social canvases. Both show large groups of ordinary Parisians enjoying outdoor leisure — dancing in a dance hall, lunching on a restaurant terrace by the river — in a way that is neither idealised nor condescending. The people in these paintings are his actual friends, his models, his patrons.

His 1881 trip to Italy — he visited Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples — provoked a crisis. The frescoes at Pompeii and the Raphaels in Rome showed him a kind of figure painting that the Impressionist approach could not achieve: solid, architectural, built on clear drawing. He spent the 1880s trying to synthesise Impressionism and classical structure, and the results were uneven.

Rheumatoid arthritis began affecting his hands and wrists in the 1890s and became progressively more severe. By his sixties his fingers were curled into claws. He moved to Cagnes-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast near Nice, for the climate. He kept painting, having a brush or a piece of charcoal strapped to his hand when he could no longer hold it. He died on 3 December 1919 at Cagnes-sur-Mer, aged seventy-eight, reportedly asking to be taken to see a painting on the morning of his death.

Five famous paintings

Dance at the Moulin de la Galette 1876

A large outdoor canvas — 131 by 175 centimetres — showing a Sunday afternoon dance at the Moulin de la Galette, a popular dance hall in Montmartre where working-class Parisians could drink cheap wine and dance in the garden. Renoir has set up the composition so that couples dance in the background while groups of friends sit and talk in the foreground. The light filters through the acacia trees and falls in shifting patches across faces, hats, and dresses. The people in the painting are his Montmartre friends and neighbours — none are professional models. He worked on it on location, carrying the large canvas to and from Montmartre. It hangs in the Musée d'Orsay.

La Grenouillère 1869

A floating swimming and boating establishment on the Seine at Croissy, the fashionable summer resort for ordinary Parisians in the 1860s. Renoir painted this composition side by side with Monet in the summer of 1869 — both canvases survive and show the same scene from slightly different angles. Renoir's version has a warmer palette than Monet's and a greater emphasis on the figures at the café tables in the foreground. The reflections on the water are built from short, parallel strokes of colour that mix optically at a distance. This painting is one of the key founding documents of Impressionist technique. It is in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm.

Dance in the City 1883

One of a pair of paintings showing contrasting dance types — city and country — both exhibited at the Durand-Ruel gallery in 1883. In the city version, a formally dressed couple dance in an interior, the woman in a long white ballgown, the man in evening dress. The composition is elegant and spare: the two figures and a large plant at the right. The woman is Suzanne Valadon, who became a painter herself and the mother of Maurice Utrillo. This painting marks the transition from Renoir's loose Impressionist handling to the firmer, more structured drawing of his 'dry period', influenced by his recent Italian trip.

Madame Charpentier and Her Children 1878

Marguerite Charpentier — wife of the publisher Georges Charpentier — sits in her elegantly furnished salon, her two young daughters beside her on a large dog. The children are identical in their frilly white dresses; the dog is enormous. The room is full of expensive objects: Japanese screens, lacquered furniture, orchid-patterned wallpaper. The painting was shown at the Salon of 1879 and was a calculated social success — the Charpentier salon was one of the centres of fashionable Paris, and exhibiting this portrait there opened precisely the kind of respectable market that the Impressionist group exhibitions had failed to reach. It hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The Large Bathers 1887

Renoir's most ambitious and most debated canvas, painted over three years of preparation after his Italian trip. Three nude women relax by a pool — two in the foreground, one in the water — in a landscape of blue sky and green foliage. The drawing is much firmer than in his Impressionist paintings: the outlines are clearly defined, the flesh is built up in smooth, warm glazes rather than broken Impressionist strokes. He cited the Girardon reliefs at Versailles as his source for the figures. Critics at the 1887 Salon were divided: some found it his masterpiece; others found it cold and academic. He was dissatisfied with it himself. It hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.