We offer FREE custom colors for every painting. Simply leave your preferences within the comments when ordering. Every painting is hand painted upon order by our artists, which allows our customers to receive a true piece of art.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir is one of the most noted of the impressionist painters. Not only have his paintings of this style gained great fame and are held up as quintessential of the movement, but he played a major part in developing the style. Renoir is considered an unabashed painter of everything beautiful from boat scenes, luncheons and landscapes to one of his most cherished subjects: women. Renoir was met with acclaim in his lifetime and created some of the most lasting and reproduced paintings of all time that have spawned countless other paintings and even fiction based upon the scenes he studied and painted.
Renoir was born to a middle class family in 1841 in Limoges, France. As a child he was sent to work for his family in a porcelain factory, where, due to exhibited skill with drawing, he soon became a painter of fine china. During this time he began painting everything from decorative fans to simple landscapes for missionaries traveling overseas. As often as he could he made his way to Paris to visit the Louvre where he studied and copied the great French masters. In his teenage years he moved to Paris permanently to study art under Charles Gleyre. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frederic Bazille and Claude Monet, contemporaries that became extremely influential and together with Renoir, developed the impressionist style.
Renoir exhibited several of his paintings in the first recorded impressionist exhibition in 1874. Some of these works later were exhibited in London. This is where Renoir was first met with the success that would become more and more familiar as time marched on. Renoir has, by this time, mostly abandoned landscapes and turned to scenes of human life and interaction. These were often social events, but as he aged, he depicted scenes of family life more often. He often used his own sons as models for these paintings.
Renoir's art is considered most notable for his use of light and his emphasis on saturated colors as well as his engaging subjects. Renoir was a master of “freely brushed touches of color” so that the subjects and their surroundings seemed to meld into one another. Along with other impressionist painters, Renoir subscribed to the practice of painting in the open air, depicting scenes with natural emotion. While Renoir did dabble in more classical styles of art, he is most remembered for his sparkling impressionistic paintings of daily life. Traditional scenes similar to some of Renoir's can be found in our Landscape Canvas section.