Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), French painter and sculptor, who was one of the leading Impressionists. He is now one of the most popular of all 19th-century painters, for his work communicates with great directness the joy that he took in the pleasures and beauties of life.

Renoir was born in Limoges, in central France, on February 25, 1841, the sixth of seven children (two of whom died in infancy) of a poor family. His father was a tailor and his mother a dressmaker. They moved to Paris in 1844, and in 1854 Renoir, aged 13, was apprenticed to a porcelain painter. He had already shown a talent for drawing and now he learnt the craft of decorating tableware. When the porcelain firm closed in 1858, he found similar decorative work painting fans and blinds. At the same time he attended evening classes in drawing, and through sheer hard work he saved enough money to become a full-time art student.

From 1861, and then from 1862 to 1864 at the Écoles des Beaux Arts, Renoir studied with Charles Gleyre, a Swiss-born painter who had a successful career with portraits and anecdotal scenes set in the world of ancient Greece and Rome. Renoir’s fellow students included Fréderick Bazille, Claude Monet, and Alfred Sisley, three painters who with him were to form the nucleus of the Impressionist group. These four enjoyed painting together in the open air in the Forest of Fontainebleau, but at this time Renoir’s approach was very different from the sunny style later associated with his name. He concentrated on serious, often sombre figure subjects. One such painting was accepted by the Salon. However, Renoir was very self-critical and destroyed the picture after the exhibition; it was Esmeralda Dancing, illustrating a scene from Notre Dame de Paris, the novel by Victor Hugo.

Renoir continued to submit such pictures to the Salon for the next few years, but with only moderate success. By 1870 he was spending a considerable amount of time painting outdoors with Monet, and by this time they had developed a distinct Impressionist style. In 1874 they joined a number of other painters who were making little headway in the official art world to mount the first Impressionist exhibition. The exhibition came in for a certain amount of adverse criticism but there were also many positive reviews, and one of Renoir’s paintings—La Loge (1874, Courtauld Institute Galleries, London)—won particular praise. The painting, a view of opera-goers in a theatre box, shows to perfection the sheer beauty of Renoir’s technique at the peak of the Impressionist period; the main figure’s pearly skin provides a wonderful contrast with the velvety blackness of the stripes of her dress. Another major Impressionist work of this period is Le Bal au Moulin de le Galette (1876, Musée d’Orsay, Paris), an open-air scene of a café, in which Renoir’s mastery of figure painting and skill in representing light are evident.

Renoir sold La Loge in 1875 for 425 francs—exactly the sum he needed to pay arrears on his rent. This was a time of general difficulty for French artists, as the country’s economy had been devastated by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 (during which Renoir had served in the army). Renoir saved himself financially by concentrating for several years on portraiture, as this was the best area in which to make money. He had an excellent temperament for a portraitist; though rather shy, he was very amiable and skilled at putting sitters at their ease. Outstanding examples of his portraits are Madame Charpentier and Her Children (1878, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Jeanne Samary (1879, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).

From the early 1880s Renoir was permanently free of financial worries, but he now faced an artistic crisis, for he believed that he had “wrung Impressionism dry” and needed to apply discipline to his work. He visited Italy in the winter of 1881-1882 and on his return his style became more formal and solid for a while, though in the mid-1880s he relaxed into a softer and more supple idiom. Although it had much of the warmth of his Impressionist style, it was grander and simpler, and he moved away from everyday life scenes in favour of timeless subjects in non-specific settings. In particular he became one of the great painters of the female nude. Les Grandes Baigneuses (1885-1887, Philadelphia Museum of Art) marks the apogee of this phase in Renoir’s output. The series of studies of the female nude to which this painting belongs reveals Renoir’s outstanding ability to depict the lustrous, pearly colour and texture of skin and to impart lyrical feeling and plasticity to a subject.

In the 1890s Renoir began to suffer from rheumatism, which became more painful after he broke his arm in 1897 when he fell from his bicycle. He spent the winters on the French Riviera, as the warm climate gave him relief from his pain; from 1903, now a painter of world renown, he was based there permanently, and in 1907 he bought an estate called Les Collettes at Cagnes, near Nice. From 1912 he used a wheelchair, but he worked indomitably; sometimes his nurse had to push his brush between his arthritic fingers. Amazingly, however, in 1913 he took up large-scale sculpture by directing an assistant to model clay for him. His sculptures are mainly voluptuous female nudes, among them Victorious Venus (1914, Tate Gallery, London). Renoir died at his home at Cagnes on December 3, 1919, aged 78. His house is now a museum dedicated to him. One of his children, the film director Jean Renoir, published a biography of the artist, Renoir, My Father, in 1962.