Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted pleasure for sixty years and worked through crippling arthritis at the end. Born in Limoges in 1841, the sixth child of a tailor, the family moved to Paris and he was apprenticed at thirteen to a porcelain factory, painting flowers on plates until industrial printing destroyed the trade. The training left him with speed, a light touch and a taste for decorative surface. He studied under Gleyre, where he met Monet, Sisley and Bazille, and spent the 1860s and 1870s painting alongside Monet at Bougival and La Grenouillère, where the two worked at the same motifs and developed the broken touch of Impressionism together. He was very poor for years and sometimes could not afford paint. His subjects separate him from the others. Where Monet pursued light on water, Renoir painted people enjoying themselves — Le Moulin de la Galette in 1876, a Sunday dance in Montmartre dappled with sunlight through leaves, and the Luncheon of the Boating Party of 1881, a group of friends on a restaurant terrace. He travelled to Italy in 1881, saw Raphael and the Pompeian frescoes, and concluded that he had gone as far as he could with Impressionism and did not know how to paint or draw. The dry period that followed emphasises firm outline and modelling. He settled in the south, married Aline Charigot, and returned to a warm, red-toned manner and to nudes. Rheumatoid arthritis deformed his hands from the 1890s; he continued with brushes placed in them by assistants, and died in 1919.

• Lived: 1841 CE – 1919 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: painter