Influential French Impressionist artist, Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Pierre-Aguste Renoir is probably best remembered today for his role in helping to develop and pioneer Impressionism. His loose brushstrokes and masterful use of colour are still celebrated to this day, and his carefree, lively paintings and appreciation of beauty remain influential more than one hundred years after the artist’s death.
Renoir was primarily a painter, but he also produced a number of prints throughout his prolific career. Prints currently account for 65% of his work sold at auction, where the majority reach prices between £100 and £500, though a significant proportion fetch up to £5,000.
Though Renoir is generally remembered today as a significant Impressionist artist, this was by no means guaranteed for much of his career. Read on to discover seven things you might not have known about Pierre-August Renoir.
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He Came From A Humble Background
Renoir was born in Limoges in 1841 to a large family of modest means. His father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress, and when the young Renoir was three, the family moved to Paris. As a child, Renoir showed artistic proclivities, but he also had an excellent singing voice, and this talent was developed and encouraged during the music lessons he attended.
However, the family’s financial difficulties meant Renoir had to stop these lessons, leave school at the age of 13, and begin work in a porcelain factory. During this time, he frequently visited the Louvre to admire the paintings, and he eventually managed to gain admission to the prestigious École des Beaux Arts, where he truly began to hone his artistic skills.
His Most Expensive Print Sold For Over £171,000
Le Chapeau Épinglé, Deuxième Planche is a lithograph from 1898; it was based on a painting Renoir finished a few years earlier, and it’s often said to have been commissioned by Ambroise Vollard, the famous French art dealer. The lithograph is a subtle reworking of one published a year earlier, which has become known as the Première Planche.
Both the Première and the Deuxième Planche depict the same charming, idyllic scene, and they are both extremely popular in today’s market, accounting for 25 of Renoir’s 30 most expensive prints sold at auction. One of the Deuxième Planche prints set a new record for Renoir when it was sold by Sotheby’s in June 2010 for £171,885, exceeding its top estimate by over £105,000.
Le Chapeau Épinglé, Deuxième Planche sold by Sotheby’s in 2010
He Helped Develop Impressionism
At the start of his career, Renoir struggled to gain recognition for his work, and a large number of the paintings he submitted to the Salon (an extremely prestigious but conservative art exhibition in Paris) were rejected.
This led Renoir and a number of other painters who’d become disillusioned with the Salon (including Monet, Degas, Cézanne, and Berthe Morisot) to stage the First Impressionist Exhibition in April 1874. Though the critical reception was generally negative, Renoir’s work was fairly well received, and the exhibition marked the start of what would become one of the major movements in the history of art.
And He Later Turned Away From The Movement
For a few years in the 1880s, Renoir abandoned Impressionism, later saying: “I had wrung Impressionism dry, and I finally came to the conclusion that I knew neither how to paint or draw.” Instead, he developed a bolder, more linear style that was at odds with the fleeting movement and shifting light the Impressionists tried to capture.
This time has become known as Renoir’s ‘dry’ or ‘Ingres’ period, but it didn’t last. By 1888, he declared: “I have taken up again, never to abandon it, my old style, soft and light of touch.” The prints he produced towards the end of the nineteenth century confirm this, with lithographs such as Enfants Jouant à la Balle and Baigneuse, Debout, En Pied retaining many beautiful Impressionist elements.
He Married One Of His Models
In 1890, Renoir married Aline Charigot, who was significantly younger than him, and who had been both his lover and model for a number of years. The couple already had one son, and they would go on to have two more together. Aline supported her ageing and increasingly sick husband until her death from a heart attack in 1915, just four years before Renoir’s own death.
The relationship appears to have been a harmonious one, and much of Renoir’s work from the 1890s (including Enfants Jouant à la Balle and Le Chapeau Épinglé) has a charming domesticity to it. As Renoir once said, “I like painting best when it looks eternal without boasting about it: an everyday eternity, revealed on the street corner: a servant-girl pausing a moment as she scours a saucepan, and becoming a Juno on Olympus.”
Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his wife Aline Charigot
His Descendants Became Well Known
Renoir and Aline’s three sons all went on to have successful creative careers; the eldest, Pierre, became an actor, and the youngest, Claude, was a ceramic artist. The middle son, Jean – who appeared in Renoir’s print, Jean Renoir (L’Enfant au Biscuit) – became a famous director who made over forty films throughout his career, and who is still considered hugely influential today.
Jean Renoir
He Continued Working Despite Ill-Health
At some point in the 1890s, Renoir began to develop rheumatoid arthritis. It grew gradually worse over the next decades, limiting the artist’s mobility and dexterity, and eventually confining him to a wheelchair. Though he struggled to hold a brush at times, it did not prevent him from painting, or dim the enjoyment he took from it; as he once said, “The pain passes but the beauty remains.”
