Renoir painted pleasure after years too poor to buy paint
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 25 February 1841 to 3 December 1919, helped invent Impressionist sociability and was dubbed the last heir of a Rubens-to-Watteau line of feminine beauty. Father of actor Pierre, filmmaker Jean, and ceramist Claude, he began as a Limoges-born porcelain painter in Paris.
A tailor's son from Limoges, Renoir grew up in central Paris a short walk from the Louvre. He showed more promise as a singer than as a draftsman, and Charles Gounod, then choirmaster at Saint-Roch, encouraged him, but money was short and he went to work painting porcelain. When the factory switched to mechanical reproduction in 1858 he decorated fans and missionary hangings to pay for lessons. At Charles Gleyre's studio from 1862 he befriended Monet, Sisley and Bazille, and some years he could not afford paint. Lise with a Parasol, a portrait of his lover Lise Tréhot, brought his first Salon success in 1868.
During the 1871 Commune, Communards took him for a spy as he painted by the Seine and nearly threw him in the river until their leader Raoul Rigault, whom Renoir had once protected, recognised him. He showed six paintings at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, where critics treated him more kindly than most, and the third show included The Swing and his crowded dance scene at the Moulin de la Galette. The Salon success of Madame Charpentier and her Children in 1879 made him fashionable. In 1882 he painted Richard Wagner's portrait in Palermo in thirty-five minutes, and a summer on Guernsey in 1883 produced fifteen paintings in about a month.
He married the dressmaker Aline Charigot, who appears playing with a dog in Luncheon of the Boating Party, in 1890; their sons became an actor, a filmmaker and a ceramist. Rheumatoid arthritis set in around 1892, and from 1907 he worked at Les Collettes near Cagnes-sur-Mer, adapting his technique to deformed hands, using a moving canvas roll and making sculpture with the young Richard Guino shaping the clay.
Source: Pierre-Auguste Renoir
