A hedonistic son of a tailor is far from the beginnings of most world famous artists. But this was the was it was for Pierre Auguste Renoir. As the fourth of five kids, he was appointed to apprentice at a ceramic studio where he painted designs onto porcelain wares. His dad set this up when he was thirteen years old because he knew that this work would give him a promising future. Working and living in Paris, France Renoir would often visit the Louvre. There, he loved to roam the halls and enjoy the artworks on display. When he was seventeen, mass production took his job. So much for dad’s theory of job security. First he painted hand fans and then painted blinds that looked like stained glass. By 1862, at the age of twenty one, he saved enough money that he could quit and go to school at É cole des Beaux-Arts under the Swiss painter, Charles Gleyre. Although a name most do not know, he taught some of the best or his time. Besides Renoir, he also taught Claude Monet, Frederic Bazille, Alfred Sisley, James Whistler, and many others. Renoir himself was not that interested in the academic approach of art making, but did get a lot out of the techniques and compositional studies, as well as the exposure to new friends and their ideas. Two years after entering the school, he had began sharing a studio space with Bazille. It was at this time Renoir really began to understand the connections between success in art and success at the Salon. Dealers, critics, and the public thoughts went closely in check with the outcome at the Salon. But although Renoir professionally needed critics to promote his work, he absolutely hated them. In 1864 he earned tenth place out of one hundred and six accepted works, with his painting Esmeralda Dancing. But ironically, Renoir hated the work. He got so sick of it and the attention it got that he destroyed it. Over the years he had several other works accepted into the show.

Northern Paris has a community known as Montmartre. This strongly art centered area was painted and home to Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and of course, Renoir. In this community is a building called le Moulin de la Galette. Built in 1622, le Moulin de la Galette was a windmill the was owned by four brothers. Three were killed defending it from Russian at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The last brother and his son were inside the mill as it was entered by a Russian soldier and the brother shot and killed the Russian. As punishment his arms and legs are hacked off and tied to each of the four sails on the windmill. The son lived and eventually inherited the mill and turned it into a dance hall, that sold galettes (a pancake made from ground flour produced within the mill), thus the name. Every Sunday afternoon, at this location, a dance was hosted for the people of this area. His painting, Dance at the Moulin de la Galette, memoralizes that event. In the painting we see many of his models from other paintings and some of his artist friends, as well as a self-portrait. This is one of his most important works. He was applying impressionism to the human form. In the work he is not concerned with form, but, instead, places the focus into the painting surface. "...A painting must above all be beautiful, loveable, and delightful, something really pretty. There are enough unpleasant things, we don't need to make new ones."

In one of my favorite Renoir paintings, Le Déjeuner des Canotiers, or The Luncheon of the Boating Party, Renoir loosens up on the impressionist feel. Impressionists love the landscape, but Renoir loves the human figure. He was not really a hardcore impressionist, like many try to classify him. He was above all else an experimentalist. “I have come to the very end of Impressionism and came to the realization that I could neither draw nor paint. In a word, I had come to a ‘deadlock.‘” The work was painted from the balcony of the Alphonse Fournaise, now Maison Fournaise, Renoir’s favorite restaurant on the river island of Chatou. “I can't leave Chatou, because my painting is not finished yet. It would be nice of you to come down here and have lunch with me. You won't regret the trip, I assure you. There isn't a lovelier place in all Paris surroundings” Overlooking the Seine River, we again see him use many of his good friends in the work as models. Painter Gustave Callebotte is seated in the lower right. His future wife, Aline Charigot, is the young woman holding the dog. He elected to take a trip to Italy, where he visited Naples, Pompeii, and Sicily. He discovered what he saw as the true masters of art, the Renaissance masters. He was strongly impacted by Raphael Sanzio and began to paint in a Neo Classical style. His work was now a fusion of the impressionistic and the renaissance styles. He worked on mastering this style for the next thirty years.

Due to his failing health, and more concerning, the punishment that arthritis had done on his body, he used a device that would move the canvas so he could paint the large canvas used for The Bathers. One of the models was the red headed beauty, Andrée Hessling. She later married his son Jean.

Renoir also dabbled in sculpture. This is truly amazing to me. How a man with severe rheumatoid arthritis even thinks, “Hay, I know! I need to start making sculptures now that my hands are in constant pain.” The power of art on the artist, is quite a powerful force indeed. He made these sculptures by aiding and guiding the hand of his studio assistant Richard Guino.

August 1919 saw a big achievement to the ageing Renoir. He witnessed his painting Portrait of Madame Charpentier, hung in his old stomping ground, the Louvre. He made it home. Less than four months later he died at the age of seventy eight.

Some in the art world saw him as a sellout to the Impressionists. This man that never painted war, death, or anything even remotely evil is a horrible traitor to the ideals he helped found. No, I don’t think so. I like to think of Renoir as an artist that was in search of pleasure in art. He always found it.