Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French painter and a founding member of the Impressionist group, exhibiting in the first three group exhibitions of 1874, 1876 and 1877 before returning to the official Paris Salon. He trained first as a porcelain painter in Limoges before entering the Paris studio of Charles Gleyre around 1861, where he met Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley and Frederic Bazille. His work of the 1870s is built from vivid, saturated color and freely broken brushwork capturing outdoor leisure, portraiture and the female figure, exemplified by his 1876 Bal du Moulin de la Galette. Following a trip to Italy in 1881 his style shifted toward a more linear, classically inspired manner shaped by Raphael and Ingres, before loosening again into softer color after 1890; the Metropolitan Museum credits this later monumental style with influencing Picasso and other early twentieth century painters. Rheumatism confined him to a wheelchair by 1912, but he continued painting, and took up sculpture, until his death in 1919.