1841-1919
Pierre Auguste Renoir, better known as Auguste Renoir, was born in 1841 in Limoges. A great French figurative painter, he painted many portraits, landscapes and nudes, and was particularly influenced by Eugène Delacroix. He is nowadays considered one of the greatest representatives of the French impressionist movement. Renoir began his career as an apprentice in a porcelain workshop. Then he entered the School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1862, where he met already established painter such as Monet, Bazille and Sisley, with whom he became friends. In the late 1860s, he regularly painted outdoors in the forest of Fontainebleau.
In 1877, and while he was exhibiting his works for several years at the Salon des Impressionistes, he created his famous painting ‘Le Bal du Moulin de la Galette’. After a period of poverty, he gradually returned to portrait painting and painted the highly successful ‘Lunch of the boaters”. In 1890, three years after the ‘Grandes Baigneuses’, he married Aline Charigot. From then, he developed a painting style between Impressionism and the Ingresque style. This is consolidated in ‘Young Girls at the Piano’, the most important painting of this new period. From 1900, Renoir acquired an international reputation and exhibited his paintings all over Europe. He died in 1919.
