Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French painter and one of the founders of Impressionism. He was born in Limoges on February 25, 1841, and died at Cagnes-sur-Mer on December 3, 1919.
He painted Parisians at leisure: sunlit dances, boating parties, women bathing. His best-known canvas, Luncheon of the Boating Party, shows a group of friends lingering over lunch on a balcony above the Seine.
The cheerful pictures came from a hard life. He grew up poor, and in his last years rheumatoid arthritis bent his fingers, yet he kept painting until the end.
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Renoir was the sixth of seven children of Léonard Renoir, a tailor, and Marguerite Merlet, a dressmaker. The family moved to Paris while he was small. He was apprenticed to a porcelain painter, and the work meant painting decorations on plates and cups.
His next job stayed in the trade of decoration. He worked briefly for a manufacturer of blinds, painting the cloth with saints and colored panes so that it looked like the stained glass of a church window.
Then he turned to real pictures. He joined the studio of Charles Gleyre, a Swiss painter who took private students in Paris, and there he met Claude Monet and other young painters who would become his companions for the next decade.
For a young painter in Paris, everything depended on the Salon, the state exhibition that decided which painters counted. In March 1863 it rejected the first picture he submitted, and what Renoir did next with that canvas was drastic.
Classmates and a first rejection
The picture the Salon turned down in 1863 was Nymph and Faun, a scene from mythology with a faun, the woodland god who is half man and half goat…
What You'll Discover
What he did with the picture the Salon rejected.
What he and Monet tried on a river.
Who owned the Moulin de la Galette.
Who sits at the table on the balcony.
What Raphael did to his style.
Who shaped the clay when his hands failed.