Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in 1841 to Marguerite Merlet and Léonard Renoir. In 1844 his family moved to Paris and by 1854, at the young age of thirteen, began painting flowers on porcelain cups and saucers. Through his parents, he began as a painter for the porcelain industry; his parents felt this was the perfect start for the beginnings of an artist. He came from the town of Limoges, where porcelain became almost a symbol of status and wealth. By 1860 he had left the porcelain factory in favor of becoming a full time painter; he was granted permission to copy paintings in the Lourve where he began to admire the eighteenth century masters. In 1862 he entered the studio of Marc-Gabriel-Charles Gleyre, a Swiss teacher who offered instruction to many upcoming artists, where he met such influences as Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley. Along with this, he began attending the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Through this he finally developed his unique brush stroke and style that was to be his own. From there, he became part of the Impressionist Era, which gave birth to a splendid era of painting which changed art forever. This new movement began in France which was what became the cultural center of Europe, and later the world.
France was an inviting place for an artist in the nineteenth century. A nation which clearly “offered the necessary conditions for an art form to flourish that was domestic scale, devoted to sensual pleasure and addressed to the private collector.” This all came about during a time when France was establishing itself as one of the cultural centers of the world. This was a peaceful era, that saw a discernible increase in industrial productivity leading to greater middle-class prosperity and freedom. Through all this, increased activity in the art world began to develop. Through a boom in collecting and dealing art, artwork became a commodity that embodied the most positive and realizable value. These factors, together with many more, helped pave the way for the “impressionist” movement that we so fondly admire today.
The idiom “impressionism” was originally suggested by a critic reviewing Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872), who blasted the painting “as a prime example of the slapdash appearance of the canvases on view at the first Impressionist exhibition.” This radical movement, born in Paris and parts of northern...
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...e match. Renoir himself said, “Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world…”
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Third Impressionist exhibition in Paris, held in 1877. Currently displayed in the Art Institute of
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Impressionist paintings can be considered documents of Paris capital of modernity to a great extent. This can be seen in their subjects, style of painting, and juxtaposition of the transitive and the eternal.
Before Impressionism came to be a major movement (around 1870-1800s), Neoclassical and Romanticism were still making their impacts. Remembering last week’s lesson, we know that both those styles were different in the fact that one was based on emotion, while the other was practical and serious. However, one thing they both shared was the fact that the artists were trying to get a message across; mostly having to do with the effects of the French Revolution, and/or being ordered to do so. With Impressionism, there is a clear difference from its predecessors.
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Impressionism is very pretty and complicated. It was from 1860 to 1910. Monet is the perfect Impressionist. Impressionism had its basic tenants. Their subject matter was the middle upper class, the city, and leisurely activities. They painted on en plein air which means they painted outdoors. They painted in snow, rain, storm, just in order to record directly the effects of light and atmosphere. They painted with strokes and touches of pure color by using a great deal of white and rarely black. They recorded the shifting play of light on the surface of objects and the effect light has on the eye without concern for the physicality of the object being painted. They were influenced by Japanese art and photography. One of Monet’s works is titled Water Lilies. The medium of this work is oil on canvas. Monet is an impressionist. He puts up pure color just describe the water. He said, when you go out paint, the impression of the scene not the exact scene.
In this essay, I shall try to examine how great a role colour played in the evolution of Impressionism. Impressionism in itself can be seen as a linkage in a long chain of procedures, which led the art to the point it is today. In order to do so, colour in Impressionism needs to be placed within an art-historical context for us to see more clearly the role it has played in the evolution of modern painting. In the late eighteenth century, for example, ancient Greek and Roman examples provided the classical sources in art. At the same time, there was a revolt against the formalism of Neo-Classicism. The accepted style was characterised by appeal to reason and intellect, with a demand for a well-disciplined order and restraint in the work. The decisive Romantic movement emphasized the individual’s right in self-expression, in which imagination and emotion were given free reign and stressed colour rather than line; colour can be seen as the expression for emotion, whereas line is the expression of rationality. Their style was painterly rather than linear; colour offered a freedom that line denied. Among the Romanticists who had a strong influence on Impressionism were Joseph Mallord William Turner and Eugéne Delacroix. In Turner’s works, colour took precedence over the realistic portrayal of form; Delacroix led the way for the Impressionists to use unmixed hues. The transition between Romanticism and Impressionism was provided by a small group of artists who lived and worked at the village of Barbizon. Their naturalistic style was based entirely on their observation and painting of nature in the open air. In their natural landscape subjects, they paid careful attention to the colourful expression of light and atmosphere. For them, colour was as important as composition, and this visual approach, with its appeal to emotion, gradually displaced the more studied and forma, with its appeal to reason.
The impressionist movement is often considered to mark the beginning of the modern period of art. It was developed in France during the late 19th century. The impressionist movement arose out of dissatisfaction with the classical, dull subjects and clean cut precise techniques of painting. They preferred to paint outdoors concentrating more on landscapes and street scenes, and began to paint ordinary everyday people and liked to show the effects in natural light.
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In conclusion, the art of the 19th century was composed of a sequence of competing artistic movements that sought to establish its superiority, ideologies and style within the artistic community of Europe. These movements, being Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, ultimately spread far beyond the confines of Europe and made modern art an international entity which can still be felt in today’s artistic world.