Renoir was essentially a figure painter and has remained one of the greatest painters of color.
It was initially closely associated with the Impressionist movement. His early works were typically impressionistic records of real life, full of eye-catching color. By the mid-1980s, however, he split from the Impressionist movement and turned to his more rigorous and formal painting techniques in portraiture and portraits, especially of women.
Of all the Impressionists, Renoir is perhaps the most popular because he painted beautiful children, flowers, beautiful landscapes, and especially lovely women. All of these would immediately captivate people. Renoir expressed the pleasing sensation he got from them directly on the canvas. He once said, "Why can't art be beautiful? There is enough ugliness in the world." He was also an admirer of the female figure, saying, "I have only completed a portrait of a human being when I feel I can touch the person in the painting."
Renoir was one of the younger members of the Impressionist group, a year younger than Monet. Most of the artist's life's work depicted young women, especially their nudes, in bright, loud, warm tones. He used a special traditional method to depict young women's soft and elastic skin and plump body with affection. Although he also painted a lot of light landscapes and innocent children's images, nudes and women's images dominated his life's work. His oil paintings of the human body are different from the hypocrisy and artifice pursued by previous school painters. Renoir's women's body, overflowing with a kind of joy and youthful vitality, one by one like the paradise of Eden never tasted the forbidden fruit of Eve, they are relaxed and comfortable, charming and confusing.
Renoir used the principles of impressionism to create a beautiful dreamlike world, a new "island of Venus", and then sent it to Paris at the end of the nineteenth century. This painting, The Ball at the Moulin Rouge, is an example of the impressionistic spirit of the moment in which he lived. Although the painting depicts an ethereal wonderland, the people in it are dressed in contemporary clothing. The men all wear tall hats or straw hats, and the women all wear skirts and waist pads held up by hooped flares. In this painting, the mundane scene of an outdoor bohemian ball is transformed into a light-filled and colorful dream of beautiful women and attentive men. Beams of light, flickering in and out, wavering over the colorful forms of the figures - blue, rose-red and yellow, finely intermingled in a romantic haze that softens and heightens the beauty of all these pleasant people.
Renoir at first followed the painter Courbet, and was very sympathetic and supportive of Courbet's antagonism to academic art. He himself strictly followed the real life, good at seeking the Impressionists among the light and color and the European classical tradition of painting combined. As a young man, he was apprenticed to a porcelain factory and used this delicate craftsmanship in his portraits. Before working with the Impressionists, he exhibited at the Salon Officiel a genre painting called "Esmeralda" based on the main character of Victor Hugo's novel "Notre Dame de Paris", who dances and sells her wares in Notre Dame Square. But later he felt that he had copied too much of the previous painting, no individuality; despite the salon to give him a favorable review, he always felt ashamed of his own artistic pursuit, quietly tore the painting.
Since the paintings of the followers of Courbet, his paintings can liberalize some, but from the composition, no matter the selected characters and painting details, there is still the nature of copying Courbet, although the painting of the goddess of the image of the folk women as a model, and then by the salon refused to show. It was not his willingness to follow the path that others had taken. Renoir realized the truth from the abuse of Manet's Lunch on the Grass: catering to official exhibitions would always be the end of his art. To seek a new path, one must dare to accept the challenge.
In 1870, Renoir was already 29 years old, his career had yet to emerge, and he was in a state of financial constraints, having to patronize pawnshops from time to time, and having to move from one attic to another many times. It was during this period that he went to Ajantey, following Monet to sketch outdoors, to understand and feel the effect of light and color in nature.
The Frog Pond was painted when he followed Monet to a scenic area near Paris. This "Frog Pond" is not far from the Seine River. When Renoir and Monet painted there together, it is known that there is a nearby restaurant for the Furness moncler outlet, Monet is a customer there. The two of them painted together, Renoir, of course, often patronized this restaurant. Renoir's painting of Frog Pond followed Monet's advice to focus on the relationship between the water and the reflection. He painted two paintings with this same composition, trying to show the feeling of light and color with small, clear brushstrokes. The water shimmers, the colors come through easily, and the visual impression is strong. This painting thus became Renoir's "introduction" to impressionism.
The Box is one of Renoir's first works to participate in the Impressionist Exhibition. He sent seven canvases. This painting according to his "impression" in the theater, back to the studio to ask someone to pose as a model to paint. The lady in front of the painting was modeled by a model named Nini Lobis. The middle-aged gentleman holding a telescope was modeled by one of Renoir's brothers. It is interesting to note that the Impressionist method of painting could also be produced in a studio, and he succeeded in painting the atmosphere of a corner of the theater. In particular, the two figures in the picture show no sign of posing; they seem to be absorbed in the play, enraptured by the moment and the stage performance. This plate, although the frame has been cut much around it, only highlights the image of the noblewoman in the box. Because Renoir rendered the colorful atmosphere, the viewer can feel the atmosphere of the theater audience. The contrast between the made-up face of the noblewoman and the male gentleman behind her is stark. The color tone of The Box is warm. It consists of the colors rose, black, and white. The black striped dress on the noblewoman is unusually prominent. These thick, broad black stripes with her white interspersed with lighter colors echo exactly the black tunic and white shirt on the gentleman. The use of black would have been taboo among Impressionist painters, as it is difficult for external light to reflect pure black. Perhaps Renoir used small brushstrokes and added them gradually, so there is no hint of the rawness of the axe.
Portrait painting in the history of European painting has had a long period of prosperity, and the impressionist painters of the portrait work more colorful activity. Renoir's portraits were y appreciated by scholars. Renoir is known for painting female nudes. His love for the female body began after the Franco-Prussian War. During the war, he joined the cavalry. As soon as peace was declared, he left his lance and returned to Paris to resume his old profession - sitting at his easel with a brush to create his beloved portraits.
The most famous Impressionist portraits of the 1870s are the three to be admired here.
Portrait of Madame Monet was painted during the first Impressionist exhibition. At that time, he followed Monet, **** with the creation of the Impressionist "Salon". In this painting, the pursuit of light and color made Renoir almost obsessed. Mrs. Monet and her son, seated on the grass, are bathed in a kind of warm sunshine. Her dress receives a strong reflection of the sunlight on the yellow grass, so the artist uses only a light rose color to spread it out, and the brushwork is quite simple.
The Portrait of Madame de Sa Marie is the best of the two paintings of the same name. The famous actress, who was a frequent presence in the Parisian salons and a flamboyant lady of high society, was named Jeanne Saumaree. The bust is executed entirely in the broken brushstrokes of the Impressionist technique, which treats the young beauty in an atmosphere of light and color. She is facing the viewer with her left hand resting on her cheek, and her ample breasts have been rendered by the intense lighting, the outlines of which are no longer very clear. Renoir's background as a ceramicist cannot be underestimated, as that ability to express transparent colors had a great influence on his personal style. Renoir painted a number of clothed and nude portraits, but he never endowed his portraits with any ideology. He explored new forms of molding with the emotion of a sincere observer. He took everything that was plastic in its fineness, and, on the principle of the prismatic analysis of the spectrum, he broke it up into countless little strokes of color, applied to the canvas in juxtaposition with each other.
The portrait of Madame Henriot (made in 1876) sees him employing these early techniques learned from the art of pottery. Madame Henriot sits serenely, the tones are exceedingly soft, and the purity and transparency of the colors give an atmospheric feeling of being filled with a fog-like atmosphere that blends everything around her. If one moves a little away from this lady, it creates an elusive illusion of color, and it is impossible to say what kind of environment the figure is in. The background almost blends in with the delicate figure, while the face is well-drawn. The breasts, which give a sense of undulation, are not painted flat, but are composed of a variety of fine brushstrokes of tonal colors.
This is characteristic of the painter's modeling during this period. Renoir is seen as an Impressionist because he exhibited a few paintings in Impressionist exhibitions. In fact, he fell at the feet of classicism when he entered the Gleyre studio at the age of 21. It was from his participation in the first joint exhibition of the Impressionists in 1874 that his basic tendencies were decided. Soon after, he broke away from the Impressionists again and turned to the Salon with success. In all of Renoir's nudes (estimated at about 4,000), there is not the slightest hint of a dark and disturbing tone. The political attacks on him for his work as an Impressionist and the many obstacles placed in his path made his early years full of suffering.
From the age of 41, he was frequently ill. For the last 15 years of his life, he suffered from an arthritic condition that made it almost impossible for him to leave his wheelbarrow. He had to bind his brushes to his hardened hands in order to paint. Surprisingly, there is not a trace of personal pain in his work at this time. His art always affirmed the beauty of life. He instinctively chose the happy things he knew: street life, the beauty of the countryside, flowers or fruits, a recreational player at the piano, a healthy and youthful woman's body. He was particularly sensitive to the flower-like delicacy of children. He had a remarkable discernment of the life around him. Shadows and grief were all but excluded from him.
In his later years, illness prevented him from expanding his horizons, and he reached a dead end in the subject of the human body. Nonetheless, it would be inappropriate to make flippant comments about his explorations. Renoir is not a frivolous artist, and his art has always brought out the happy and sweet side of life.
One important area of Renoir's painting is portraiture. As we noted in the portrait of Madame Henriot, the purity and transparency of the colors are a characteristic feature of Renoir's portraits, and in the seventies Renoir painted some of his most successful portraits, namely the two Portrait of Vidor Chauquet (1876), the two Portrait of Saamarie (1877), and the multi-figure portrait Madame de Chabantière and Her Children, which is the subject of the portrait to be admired here. Renoir, who was entering the heyday of his artistic career, was not yet fortunate in his personal life. Poverty forced him to share a potato field with Monet and sell the potatoes to make ends meet. After his first Impressionist exhibition was met with social cynicism, the following year he presented 14 genre paintings, including The Pancake Mill, which also attracted a lot of criticism. Someone in Le Figaro wrote in a lecturing tone, "To remind Mr. Renoir that a woman's body is not a heap of rotten flesh with the green and purple spots of a carcass that has completely decomposed." Of course, there were plenty of righteous people who defended him. But he also had to do a lot of portraits for other people in order to make a living.
In portraiture he earned back his reputation. The several portraits mentioned above are examples of the time. Vito Chocquet was an admirer of Renoir's art. He was quite a connoisseur, but he was only a Parisian civil servant. Both Renoir and Cézanne painted portraits of him. The Portrait of Saamarie is one of the two most exquisite portraits of the actress Jeanne Saamarie, one a full-length portrait; the other a bust. The colors are passionate and fervent in these portraits.
This one, "Madame Charpentier and Her Children," was his claim to fame in the 1970s.
Mrs. Charpentier was the wife of a prominent publisher, a socialite and a salon hostess. She made friends with a wide range of literary and artistic notables. Frequent guests in her salon were writers such as Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert, Edmond Goncourt, Turgenev and others; artists such as Henner, Carolus Durand and so on. Renoir soon became a regular in her salon as well. It was there that the painter met Jeanne Saumurier, a famous actress of the time. The painting was commissioned by Madame.
The painting makes full use of his deep-rooted modeling skills, which he had acquired in his youth while studying at the Greer Studio, and for which he is grateful. Take the spacious interior and set off the spirit of this lady with her two innocent daughters. The lady is seated to the right of the children and gazes at her two daughters in a relaxed and serene manner. The innocent expressions of the children are vividly depicted as the two seem to be having a whimsical conversation. A girl on the left is sitting on the back of a large dog. The whole picture is full of a kind of celestial interest that is characteristic of wealthy families. The background is brownish-red, and there is a strong contrast between the colors of the figures' clothes, with the lady's black dress overpowering the whole picture, making the sky-blue and white dresses of the two children on the left stand out even more.
The painting received favorable reviews at the Paris Salon of 1879. Renoir's life took a turn for the better. He was paid a fee of 1,000 francs, which seemed like manna from heaven for the then-poor artist, and from that point on, he was inundated with clients who ordered portraits from him, a financial turnaround that needed no introduction. In addition to the portrait of Madame Charpentier, Renoir painted individual portraits of her mother and of her daughters. So it was not only the portrait of Madame Charpentier and her children that was selected for the Salon. Nevertheless, Renoir did not lose sight of his goal because of the Salon's appreciation, and he cherished this true-to-life feeling, but also the skill of coloring in the external light, which he had acquired through long efforts.
Renoir's eight years from 1881, when he was 40, to 1888 were a period of stylistic transformation. When he achieved success at the Salon in 1879, he began traveling. Portrait orders turned his life from poverty to wealth. After spending the first half of his life tramping around the city of Paris and the Seine, he wanted to realize his long-awaited desire to go sightseeing. His first destination was the Normandy Riviera, then Croissy, and in the spring of 1881, Algiers. In the summer of that year, and then went to Normandy, the fall that is embarked on a journey to Italy, where visited Rome, Venice, Florence, Naples, Pompeii and other places, and prompted a change in the mechanism of his style of painting, is this trip to Italy. When Renoir visited the ancient Roman frescoes in Pompeii, he discovered its simple, heavy and brilliant hues. Those ancient frescoes favored a reddish hue, which was a rich vermilion. In his later years, Renoir painted a nude woman in this "Pompeii red" color. Ancient frescoes generally used little color, but the effect is very rich. This taught him that the dominant tone of a painting often plays a key role. 1883, he bought a book belonging to the late 14th-century Italian painter Cinzino Cinzini's "Theory of Painting" in a French used bookstore, and this book made him fascinated. Together with the secret of simplifying the colors of classical paintings that he had learned from Italy, he further became enthusiastic about the classicism of his predecessor, Ingres, so some researchers also call Renoir's period from 1881 to 1888 the "Ingres period" or the neo-classical period. When he talked to the dealer Vollard about the reasons for the change in his artistic tendency, he said: "Around 1883, I had reached the end of my rope with Impressionism. I had to admit at last that I had run out of skill in both painting and drawing. In short, for me, Impressionism was a dead end".
This is the internal reason for his departure from Impressionism that we mentioned earlier when admiring his portraits such as Madame Henriot.
The two paintings here, The Umbrella and The Country Ball, are representative of what emerged from the artist's shift in style.
In The Umbrella, the artist has not yet completely abandoned the method of depicting color under the effect of external light. The painting shows a spring day in Paris. Bustling pedestrians suddenly encountered showers, so the open umbrellas formed an interesting network of curved lines. The artist realized the decorative interest of the umbrellas themselves in the painting. He painted these arcs overlapping in the upper half of the picture. The viewer, through these curved umbrellas, sees further down a busy and bustling scene: in the foreground, to the left, is a beautiful and colorful young lady with a basket containing several hats for sale. Behind her, a gentleman-like man is eyeing her and trying to come forward to please the woman with an umbrella to protect her from the rain. In the foreground, on the right, are two little girls hurrying to the market, the smaller one holding a tumbler toy in her hand, her eyes attentive to the spectators. In the center, two richly dressed women stand on the center view. The front one seems to be interested in the little girl with the tumbler in her hand; the woman in the back has just opened her umbrella. There are not many figures in this painting, but the overlapping treatment, the different orientations of the curved lines of the umbrellas, and the overall tonal atmosphere make for an unusually lively and rich scene that gives a sense of crowding. Renoir has adopted a dominant tone of blue and purple, thus filling the picture with a rhythmic simplicity. The scene is very moving. The spring rainy Parisian street scene adds a rhythm of life to this crowded marketplace.
The painting "Country Ball" has been cut to highlight a dancing couple. Renoir is known to have painted several paintings of this couple with different compositions of the same subject. The contrast between the colorful gowns of the female partner and the dignified black dress of the male partner is striking. The artist focused on the skin color of the female partner and the pleated satin evening gown. In order to paint the plump and well-proportioned female partner, the artist had a famous female model of the time, Suzanne Valenton, pose (this female model later became a painter as a result of her long training by the Impressionist painters). The overall effect was more classical, and thus annoyed some of his fellow Impressionists. But Renoir was a man who was never satisfied with his accomplishments. When he came to feel that the steady lines of classical painting clashed with his strong sense of color, he tried to change his style, even his subject matter.
Blonde Bather (c. 1882) The style here belongs to the period of stylistic change during his travels to Italy, with a greater tendency to favor the intrinsic colors of the object. The bright and soft tones are close to the objective reality. The sense of airiness and light and color of the object is washed out. Scholars have hypothesized that the earliest motivation for this painting may have come from a 17th-century bas-relief he saw at Versailles. The relief was by Siladon. Renoir made several sketches and exercises for this relief. Coupled with his this time on the classical painting method to value some, and finally completed in the painting room such a rigorous composition, the human body texture is fully expressed in the nude painting. From the nude woman's head of fine smooth blonde hair, bright skin color, precise and smooth lines, this painting has been regarded as Renoir in the neo-classical period of a masterpiece.
Renoir's paintings of the female body, in the later period to greatly exceed the number of the earlier period, and the quality is also high. The female nudes he painted often have the same kind of radiant character that Rubens painted, and are characterized by a voluptuous functional beauty. The artist likes to paint the woman's skin as soft and glossy as pearl. Sometimes the woman's body hair is fluffy, and between the eyebrows also exudes a youthful charm. Sometimes they look innocent, but healthy and mature. A few women's body works with a certain wild simplicity. In short, his style of painting the human body does not seem to match his own character and life. For example, the female nude on this painting, Woman after Bathing (1888), has a rosy complexion that shows the girl's robustness and fitness. Extremely fine brushstrokes make up the surface of this woman's plump, silky skin. The image of her elastic, seductive female body is impossible to relate to Renoir's own life situation at the time.
The painter's entire passion went into his brushwork, and in 1894 Renoir was stricken with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that afflicted the half-century-old painter. After a few years of deterioration, to 1903, he had to move to the south of France, Provence, Canoux to convalesce for a period of time. The mild climate of the south may have been favorable to his illness. He had also sought medical treatment, and had been operated on in several places, including his knees, feet, and hands. At first he could walk with crutches, but after 1910, his lower limbs were paralyzed and he was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. In 1912, he was paralyzed for a time, but after treatment, he improved slightly, and his upper body had regained its physiological functions. However, in such an unfortunate period of illness, he was forced to restrain the physical torture, sitting in a wheelchair to paint a large number of nude paintings expressing the beauty of female youth and full of the joy of life, it is really touching! Renoir's later paintings of the female body can truly show the rich and delicate colors and skin texture of the human body. Appreciation of his nude paintings will make one feel the blood flowing underneath these skins, moisturizing the complexion, now pink flesh color.
Said to be one of Renoir's favorite models in his later years, named Gabrielle. The painter sometimes let her pretend to bathe and wipe her feet; sometimes let her dress up as women of different identities, leading children; sometimes let her wear rough clothes, or let her read books and so on. As for the nude image, it is usually placed under a clear sunny day. Sunny enough to show the young woman's crystal smooth skin in the soft color of natural light.