Renoir by Sandra Forty

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was, above all, a painter of people, especially young women and rosy-cheeked children. In many ways, he is the most approachable Impressionist. Not for him were the grim realities of a hard life. Renoir painted people enjoying themselves: talking, flirting, laughing, often dancing, eating, drinking, and simply passing joyful times together. A constant theme throughout his works is the female nude. It was a subject he approached over and over again, sometimes sharply defining the figure, but more typically gently blurring the outline to better suggest the curves and shadows of the model’s flesh. Renoir was one of the founding theorists and practitioners of the Impressionist movement, using techniques he developed as he painted side by side with Claude Monet. But after a visit to Italy in 1881, he abandoned the Impressionist movement, returning to a much more conventional, populist approach with linear, classical composition and execution. Unfortunately, the long-standing success of Impressionism has overshadowed Renoir’s later work.