Artwork Description
Pierre-Auguste Renoir – Les Amoureux, Aline Charigot and Henri Laurent
Dimensions: 40.25 x 34.5 x 3.5″ framed / 31.9 x 25.5″ unframed
Year: 1885
Medium: sanguine on paper laid down on canvas
Pierre Auguste Renoir (born February 25, 1841, Limoges, France—died December 3, 1919, Cagnes, France) painter originally associated with the Impressionist movement of the second half of the nineteenth century whose members sought in their works to represent the first impression of an object upon the viewer. His work is characterized by a richness of feeling and a warmth of response to the world and to the people in it.
His early works were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling color and light. By the mid-1880s, however, he broke with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women.
Renoir was so passionate about painting that he even continued when he was old and suffering from severe arthritis. Renoir then painted with the brush tied to his wrists.