Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir [ pjɛːʁ oˈgyst ʁəˈnwaːʁ ] (born February 25, 1841 in Limoges , Limousin , † December 3, 1919 in Cagnes-sur-Mer , Côte d'Azur ), often just called Auguste Renoir , was one of the most important French painters of impressionism .
Life
Childhood and youth
Renoir was born to a working class family. His father was a tailor and his mother a tailor. When Pierre-Auguste was three years old, the family moved to Paris and found accommodation near the Louvre , which at the time was not only a museum but also housed offices and living quarters.
At the age of 13 Renoir started an apprenticeship as a porcelain painter . At the age of 15, he was already able to do this so well that the manufactory entrusted him with sophisticated painting work that was otherwise reserved for experienced porcelain painters. He was able to live independently from his wages and even support his parents. Around this time, however, mechanical printing processes for porcelain took hold, and the factory had to close when he was 17 years old. Renoir now had to make a living by painting fans and awnings and coloring coats of arms.
Renoir's impressionist phase
1861–1864 Renoir studied painting in the class of the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre . Soon, however, he looked for other artistic role models than his teacher, namely Gustave Courbet and Díaz de la Peña , whom he had met by chance while painting in the forest and who encouraged him to always paint from life and the model. He made friends with Claude Monet , Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille and painted with them outdoors. In 1864 a picture of him was first accepted for the Paris Salon , often simply called the Salon. In the Salon of 1868 he was represented with the picture Lise with the parasol , for which Lise Tréhot was the model. She was Renoir's lover from about 1865 to 1871.
His outdoor experiences also had an impact on his studio pictures. Critics took notice of him and praised the freshness and naturalness of his pictures. Nevertheless, there were hardly any buyers. In 1869 Renoir lived in such abject poverty that, as he later wrote himself, he did not even have something to eat every day.
In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, Renoir volunteered for a cavalry regiment, but was only stationed far away from the fighting. In 1871, when he returned to Paris, he was caught in the uprising of the Paris Commune . Forced into conscription by the Communards, he got into great difficulties when he tried to flee Paris and was captured by the troops on the other side.
After the war he soon got back in touch with his friends Monet and Sisley and spent a lot of time with them and with Édouard Manet in the summers of the 1870s . A well-known painting by him from that period shows the Monet family in the garden of their house in Argenteuil. Manet has his own interpretation of the same subject. Both Manet and Renoir had placed their easels side by side and painted the same scene.
Renoir loved to depict social events and to translate joie de vivre into pictures. Despite the movements of the people portrayed as in dance in the Moulin de la Galette and the exuberance, he integrated small still lifes .
Unlike Monet and the other Impressionists, Renoir continued to endeavor to have his pictures included in the Salon, but in 1874 he participated with great enthusiasm in the preparation and implementation of the first Impressionist exhibition, as well as the exhibition of 1876.
He managed to sell pictures to the art dealers Paul Durand-Ruel and Père-Martin. Durand-Ruel, a great patron of the Impressionists, gave him money so that Renoir could rent a studio. However, this income was so tight that it was just enough to make a living.
His financial situation turned for the better in the mid-1870s when Renoir met the customs officer Victor Chocquet and the publisher Georges Charpentier and received orders from them for portraits and a large panel painting. Thanks to the advocacy of the influential Madame Charpentier , his circle of acquaintances in better society expanded, and in the following years he received so many portrait commissions that they even became annoying to him at times.
In the years 1881/1882 Renoir made three major trips to Algeria, Italy and again to Algeria. In 1882 he portrayed the composer Richard Wagner in Palermo .
Post-impressionist phase of life
After a stay in Italy in 1881, while reading a handbook for painters written around 1400, he orientated himself heavily on Raphael's frescoes and on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres , the Ingres period or dry period began . Renoir began to orientate himself from scratch, he turned away from the spontaneous and drew the shapes more sharply, but stuck to the motifs full of joie de vivre. He also turned away from impressionism and towards classicism . A trip in September 1883 took him to the island of Guernsey , where he created a number of paintings, including Moulin Huet Bay .
Around 1883 Renoir got into a creative crisis. At that time he sensed a lukewarm disinterest in the audience and in the critics, and he said about himself that he was in an artistic dead end. The work of those years culminated in the painting The Great Bathers from 1887, in which he had invested years in preliminary studies and which contains a wealth of art-historical quotations.
On March 23, 1885, his lover Aline Charigot, whom he met in the early 1880s and who had accompanied him to Italy, gave birth to his first child, his son Pierre Renoir , who later became known as an actor. On April 14, 1890, Renoir married Aline. The second son Jean Renoir , born in 1894, later took up the profession of film director. The third son Claude, also called "Coco", was born on August 4, 1901.
At the end of the 1880s he found his joy in color and in fluid, sensual painting. The departure from his Impressionist painting style of the 1870s, however, remained permanent.
Around 1892, Renoir showed the first signs of rheumatoid arthritis . At the time, gout was mistakenly diagnosed. After several spa stays, he noticed that he was doing better in the mild Mediterranean climate, and in 1907 he moved permanently to Les Collettes , a country house with a large garden in Cagnes-sur-Mer near Nice. A museum was built there in his honor in the 20th century.
Despite his illness, he painted incessantly. Renoir was now in a wheelchair and, according to his own statements, had the brush tied to his hand every day because he could no longer hold it. Through Aristide Maillol Renoir got the opportunity to work with his student Richard Guino. With this collaboration Renoir was able to once again produce works such as u. a. Venus Victrix, The Great Washerwoman (1917) and Mother and Child (1916) realize.
Pïerre-Auguste Renoir died in 1919 at the age of 78 and left around 6,000 works: landscapes, still lifes, portraits of adults and children, nudes, pictures of dancing and family life. His grave is in the cemetery in Essoyes in the Aube department in Champagne .
Works (selection)
image | title | When originated | Size, material | Exhibition / collection / owner |
---|---|---|---|---|
Flowers in greenhouse | 1864 | Oil on canvas | Hamburger Kunsthalle | |
Mademoiselle Romaine Lascaux | 1864 | 81 × 65 cm, oil on canvas | Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland | |
The painter Bazille at his easel | 1867 | 105 × 73 cm, oil on canvas | Musée d'Orsay in Paris | |
Diana as a huntress | 1867 | 197 × 132 cm, oil on canvas | National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC | |
Lise with the parasol | 1867 | 184 × 115 cm, oil on canvas | Folkwang Museum in Essen | |
The circus clown | 1868 | 192 × 128 cm, oil on canvas | Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo | |
In summer | 1868 | 85 × 59 cm, oil on canvas | Old National Gallery in Berlin | |
The Sisley couple | 1868 | 105 × 75 cm, oil on canvas | Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne | |
La Grenouillère | 1869 | 66 × 86 cm, oil on canvas | Swedish National Museum in Stockholm | |
The walk | 1870 | 80 × 64 cm, oil on canvas | J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles | |
Odalisque | 1870 | 69 × 123 cm, oil on canvas | National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC | |
Pont-Neuf | 1872 | 74 × 93 cm, oil on canvas | National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC | |
Madame Monet on the divan | 1872 | 54 × 73 cm, oil on canvas | Museu Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon | |
Claude Monet, painting in his garden at Argenteuil | 1873 | 46 × 60 cm, oil on canvas | Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut | |
Madame Monet and her son | 1874 | 51 × 68 cm, oil on canvas | National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC | |
The lodge | 1874 | 80 × 64 cm, oil on canvas | Courtauld Institute of Art in London | |
dancer | 1874 | 142 × 93 cm, oil on canvas | National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC | |
The Parisian | 1874 | 82 × 101 cm, oil on canvas | National Museum Cardiff in Cardiff | |
After the bath | 1876 | (glazed): 92.4 × 73.2 cm, oil on canvas | Belvedere in Vienna | |
The swing | 1876 | 92 × 73 cm, oil on canvas | Musée d'Orsay in Paris | |
Bal au Moulin de la Galette | 1876 | 131 × 175 cm, oil on canvas | Musée d'Orsay in Paris | |
The excursion of the conservatory | 1876-1877 | 187 × 117 cm, oil on canvas | Barnes Foundation in Merion near Philadelphia | |
Jeanne Samary | 1878 | 173 × 102 cm, oil on canvas | General Staff Building in Saint Petersburg | |
Madame Charpentier and her children | 1878 | 131 × 88 cm, oil on canvas | Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York | |
The wave | 1879 | 64.8 × 99.2 cm, oil on canvas | Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago | |
Rowers in Chatou | 1879 | 81 × 100 cm, oil on canvas | National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC | |
The rowers' breakfast | 1880-1881 | 130 × 173 cm, oil on canvas | Phillips Collection in Washington, DC | |
The Doge's Palace in Venice | 1881 | 54.5 × 65 cm, oil on canvas | Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts | |
Le Grand Canal, Venise (Gondole) | 1881 | 54 × 64.8 cm, oil on canvas | At Koller in Zurich in December 2014, US auctioned | |
Fruits of the south | 1881 | 51 × 68.5 cm, oil on canvas | Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago | |
The umbrellas | 1881-1885 | 180 × 115 cm, oil on canvas | National Gallery in London | |
Richard Wagner | 1882 | 53 × 46 cm, oil on canvas | Musée d'Orsay in Paris | |
Dance in the city | 1882-1883 | 180 × 90 cm, oil on canvas | Musée d'Orsay in Paris | |
Dance in the country | 1882-1883 | 180 × 90 cm, oil on canvas | Musée d'Orsay in Paris | |
Portrait of Paul Haviland | 1884 | 57 × 43 cm, oil on canvas | Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City | |
Children's afternoon in Wargemont | 1884 | Oil on canvas | Museum Alte Nationalgalerie , Berlin | |
The child with a whip | 1885 | 81 × 92 cm, oil on canvas | General Staff Building in Saint Petersburg | |
The great bathers | 1887 | 115 × 170 cm, oil on canvas | Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia | |
Young girls at the piano | 1892 | 116 × 90 cm, oil on canvas | Musée d'Orsay in Paris | |
Jean Renoir , sewing | 1900 | 55 × 46 cm, oil on canvas | Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne | |
The judgment of Paris | 1908 | 81 × 100 cm, oil on canvas | Phillips Collection in Washington, DC | |
Bathers drying their legs | 1910-1911 | 84 × 65 cm, oil on canvas | Museu de Arte de São Paulo in São Paulo | |
Sitting girl | 1910-1917 | Black chalk | Albertina (Vienna) | |
Rest after the bath | 1918-1919 | 110 × 160 cm, oil on canvas | Musée d'Orsay in Paris |
reception
According to the art critic Raymond Cogniat, Renoir's life can be divided into four phases: "The first, from the beginnings of the painter to the first years of Impressionism, includes family scenes, portraits of relatives and friends. In the second period, the commissioned portraits are made, so receives Renoir's recognition in the discerning bourgeoisie. The third period shows more elaborate paintings, contours and clarity of the representations become more professional. Complete independence is found in the fourth phase, in which his environment such as children, wife and housemaid Gabrielle are included ".
In the exhibition Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting conceived by curator Colin Bailey at the Frick Collection in New York City 2012, Renoir can be experienced not only as a color connoisseur , but also especially as a clothing fashion connoisseur. Only his portrait-format full-body pictures from the years between 1874 and 1885 were included in the show.
The film Eine Landpartie (shot in 1936, published in 1946) by his son Jean Renoir is a homage to his father, in this film he recalls Pierre-Auguste Renoir's impressionist paintings of land parties and canoeists. 1952 was created with Joy of Living; The Art of Renoir is an Oscar- nominated short film by Jean Oser that deals with the life and work of the artist.
The film Renoir , shot in 2012, shows the protagonist Renoir and the actress Catherine Hessling , one of his last nude models, who was married to his son Jean Renoir.
Eponyms
The asteroid (6677) Renoir and the Mercury crater Renoir are named after him.
literature
- Edmond Renoir: My brother Auguste Renoir. The letter from 1879 . Translated from the French by Elisabeth Edl. Piet Meyer, Basel 2007, ISBN 978-3-905799-02-6 .
- Jean Renoir : My father Auguste Renoir. (Original title: Renoir ). Diogenes, Zurich 1981, ISBN 3-257-22425-7 .
- Julius Meier-Graefe : Renoir . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-458-32556-5 .
- Bruce Bernard (Ed.): The Great Impressionists . Delphin, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-7735-5323-4 .
- Auguste Renoir. Paintings 1862–1917. Catalog for the exhibition of the same name in the Kunsthalle Tübingen . DuMont, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-7701-3594-6 .
- Ingrid Mössinger, Karin Sagner (Eds.): Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Painted like silk. Catalog for the exhibition of the same name in the Chemnitz art collections . Hirmer, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-7774-4461-1
- Karin Sagner: Renoir and his women. Ideals on the screen - seasoned women in life. With a foreword by Jacques Renoir (great-grandson). Sandmann, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-938045-67-1 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the German Digital Library
- Search for Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
- Works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir at Zeno.org .
- Pierre-August Renoir, Catalog raisonnée. Publication by the publishing house and gallery Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 2007
- Renoir. “Between bohemian and bourgeoisie” - the early years. Website for the exhibition from April to August 2012 at the Kunstmuseum Basel
- Anke Rebbert: December 3rd, 1919 - anniversary of the death of Pierre-Auguste Renoir WDR ZeitZeichen on December 3rd, 2019 (podcast)
Individual evidence
- ^ The Nationalgallery , Moulin Huet Bay , accessed June 15, 2011.
- ↑ Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Aline Charigot . In: Tatjana Kuschtewskaja : Secrets of beautiful women. Famous artists and their models . Grupello Verlag, Düsseldorf 2018, ISBN 978-3-89978-301-8 , pp. 82–91.
- ^ Website of the city of Cagnes-sur-mer with Musée Renoir (fr) ( Memento of October 12, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Neret, Gilles: Renoir, Taschen Verlag, Cologne, 2019, pp. 468–469
- ↑ Neret, Gilles: Renoir, Taschen Verlag, Cologne, 2019, p. 224
- ↑ According to Bailey, the underlying facts were: “Renoir's father and brothers were tailors. His mother and many of his friends were seamstresses. "
- ↑ Deutschlandradio Kultur from February 16, 2012: “Big Throws” - The Frick Collection in New York shows Pierre-Auguste Renoir's full-body pictures.
- ↑ Pierre-Auguste and Jean Renoir in the Musée d´Orsay - childhood in the studio. Accessed December 3, 2019 (German).
personal data | |
---|---|
SURNAME | Renoir, Pierre-Auguste |
ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Renoir, Auguste |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French impressionism painter |
DATE OF BIRTH | February 25, 1841 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Limoges |
DATE OF DEATH | December 3, 1919 |
Place of death | Cagnes-sur-Mer , French Riviera |