Renoir, Pierre Auguste

Pierre Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges on February 25, 1841 and died December 3, 1919.

Pierre Auguste Renoir produced his first prints around 1890. He was by then almost 50 years old and a celebrated artist. His print making activities therefore came in response to requests from publishers, authors, and colleagues who imagined how desireable prints by the master would be. During the following 14 years, Renoir created most of his 50 published graphic works.

Almost half of Renoir's graphic works were published by Ambroise Vollard, the preeminent publisher of graphics and livres d'artistes during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Vollard commissioned mostly lithographs by Renoir and the few etchings served as frontispieces for the deluxe editions of his monographs on the artist.

The majority of Renoir's etchings and drypoints appeared in books.

As a child Renoir worked in a porcelain factory in Paris, painting designs on china; at 17 Renoir copied paintings on fans, lamp shades, and blinds. Renoir studied painting formally in 1862-63 at the academy of the Swiss painter Charles Gabriel Gleyre in Paris. Renoir's early work was influenced by two French artists, Claude Monet in his treatment of light and the romantic painter Eugène Delacroix in his treatment of color.

Renoir first exhibited his paintings in Paris in 1864, but he did not gain recognition until 1874, at the first exhibition of painters of the new impressionist school.
Renoir fully established his reputation with a solo exhibition held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1883. In 1887 he completed a series of studies of a group of nude female figures known as The Bathers (Philadelphia Museum of Art). During the last 20 years of his life Renoir was crippled by arthritis; unable to move his hands freely, he continued to paint, however, by using a brush strapped to his arm. Renoir died at Cagnes, a village in the South of France, on December 3, 1919.