Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, known as Auguste Renoir, was born in Limoges on February 25, 1841. He was the sixth of seven children and came from a family of craftsmen. 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 began an apprenticeship as a porcelain painter. At the age of 15, he mastered this so well that the manufactory entrusted him with demanding painting work that was otherwise reserved for experienced porcelain painters. He was able to live independently on his wages and even support his parents. Around this time, however, mechanical printing processes for porcelain became established, and the manufactory 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. From 1861 to 1864, Renoir studied painting in the class of the Swiss painter Charles Gleyre. Soon, however, he looked for artistic role models other 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 became friends with Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Frédéric Bazille and painted with them outdoors. In 1864, a painting of him was accepted for the first time for the Paris Salon, often simply called the Salon. In the Salon of 1868 he was represented with the painting 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 effect on his studio paintings. Critics took notice of him and praised the freshness and naturalness of his paintings. Nevertheless, there were hardly any buyers. In 1869, Renoir lived in such abject poverty that, as he later wrote, he did not even have anything to eat every day. In 1870, during the Franco-German 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 up in the uprising of the Paris Commune. Forced into conscription by the Communards, he had great difficulties when he tried to flee Paris and was captured by the troops of the opposing side. After the war, he soon regained contact with his friends Monet and Sisley and spent much time together with them and with Édouard Manet in the summers of the 1870s. A well-known painting by him from that time shows the Monet family in the garden of their house in Argenteuil. Manet has his own interpretation of the same theme. Both Manet and Renoir had placed their easels next to each other and painted the same scene. Renoir loved to depict social occasions and translate joie de vivre into pictures.

Despite the movements of the depicted persons, such as in the dance at the Moulin de la Galette and the exuberance, he integrated small still lifes. Unlike Monet and the other Impressionists, Renoir continued to make efforts to include his paintings in the Salon, but in 1874 he participated with great enthusiasm in the preparation and implementation of the first Impressionist exhibition, as well as in the exhibition of 1876. He succeeded in selling paintings 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 scarce that it was just enough to cover the living expenses. His financial situation took a turn for the better in the mid-1870s, when Renoir met the customs officer Victor Chocquet and the publisher Georges Charpentier and received commissions from them for portraits and a large panel painting. Through the intercession of the influential Madame Charpentier, his circle of acquaintances in the upper classes expanded, and he received so many portrait commissions in the following years that they even became a nuisance to him at times. In 1881/1882 Renoir made three major trips to Algeria, Italy and again to Algeria. In 1882 he portrayed the composer Richard Wagner in Palermo. After a stay in Italy in 1881, while reading a manual for painters written around 1400, he oriented himself strongly towards Raphael’s frescoes and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the Ingres period or dry period began. Renoir began to reorient himself from the ground up, he turned away from the spontaneous and drew the forms more sharply, but remained full of joie de vivre with the motifs. 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 fell into a creative crisis. At that time, he sensed a lukewarm lack of interest on the part of the audience and 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 had met in the early 1880s and who had accompanied him to Italy, gave birth to their first child, 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 rediscovered his joy in colourfulness and fluid, sensual painting. However, the departure from his impressionist painting style of the 1870s remained final. Around 1892, Renoir showed the first signs of rheumatoid arthritis. At that time, gout was wrongly diagnosed. He noticed through several spa stays that he was better off 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. The museum dedicated to him was opened in 1960. 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 was given the opportunity to work with his pupil Richard Guino. With this collaboration, Renoir was once again able to realize works such as Venus Victrix, The Great Washerwoman (1917) and Mother and Child (1916). Pierre-Auguste Renoir died in 1919 at the age of 78 and left behind around 6000 works: landscapes, still lifes, portraits of adults and children, nudes, pictures of dancing and family life. He is buried in the cemetery in Essoyes in the Aube department in Champagne.

Quelle: Wikipedia