Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

Renoir was a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and in the studio of Charles Gleyre. Renoir met Claude Monet and they experimented with painting outdoors.  Renoir’s painting of Esmeralda was accepted into the 1864 Salon. In 1868 and 1870 he showed in the Salon again.

By this time, Monet was painting almost exclusively out of doors, and Renoir often set up his easel nearby.  The innovative methods they developed—painting with lighter colors, painting less sharply defined figures and features, and painting scenes of ordinary Parisians at play—were a radical departure from the standard Salon fare.

Renoir became popular for his portraits of fashionable Paris society and garnered financial freedom for the first time.  As the 1880s went on, Renoir turned to soft, loosely conveyed images of intimate family scenes

In the early 1900s he purchased property outside of Nice with a view of the Mediterranean and retired there, with hope that the drier, warmer climate would ease his rheumatism.  Renoir died in 1919.