Pierre Auguste Renoir facts: Top 8 facts about life of famous artist

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Pierre Auguste Renoir facts

Among the famous artists of the world, there are names whose mention immediately causes spiritual joy. There are artists that many people know, and numerous monographs, books, and scientific articles are devoted to their work. And there are artists who are simply loved. Pierre Auguste Renoir is one of these artists and below some of the Pierre Auguste Renoir facts.

1. Pierre Auguste Renoir had a talent for vocals

Pierre Auguste Renoir was born on February 25, 1841, in Limoges in a large family of a tailor, Of seven children, he was the sixth. In 1844, the family moved to Paris and here little Auguste joined the Church choir at the Grand Cathedral of Saint-Eustache. He turned out to have such a wonderful voice that the choir Director (and this was none other than Charles Gounod himself) tried to convince the boy’s parents to send him to study music.

2. Auguste started working at the age of 13 in a porcelain workshop

Pierre Auguste Renoir facts: he showed the talent as an artist, and when he was 13 years old, he began to help the family, getting a job with a master, from whom he learned to paint porcelain plates and other dishes. In the evenings, Auguste attended the school of painting.

Renoir’s younger brother Edmond said:

“From what he drew with charcoal on the walls, it was concluded that he has the ability to be an artist. It so happened that our parents gave it to a porcelain painter. The young apprentice began to learn the craft seriously: the day was ending, and, armed with cardboard larger than himself, he went to free drawing courses. This went on for two or three years. He made rapid progress: after a few months of apprenticeship, he was already assigned to paint items that are usually given to workers, which made him the object of jokes – he was teased by Monsieur Rubens, he cried because he was laughed at.”

3. Renoir passed the first exam for an artist at his work colleague

Pierre Auguste Renoir facts: one of Levi’s workers, Emile Laporte, was engaged in oil painting at his leisure. He suggested that Renoir use his canvases and paints. It is with this fact that the appearance of the first picture of the future impressionist is connected. In a solemn ceremony, it was shown to Laporte at the Renoir house.

Edmond Renoir recalled:

“It was like yesterday. I was still a boy, but I was well aware that something serious was going on: the easel with the famous painting was placed in the middle of the largest room of our modest home in the Rue Argenteuil; everyone was nervous and impatient, and I was beautifully dressed and told to behave. It was very solemn.

“The master” has arrived… At a sign given to me, I moved his chair to the easel, and he sat down and began to examine the ” work.” It was, as I can see now, “eve”; behind it, the snake was twining around the branches of the oak, and it was approaching with its mouth open as if it wanted to fascinate eve.

The trial lasted at least a quarter of an hour; after which, without further comment, this poor old man approached our parents and said to them: “You must allow your son to paint; in our trade, at the most, he will earn twelve or fifteen francs a day. I predict a brilliant future for him in art; do everything you can for him.”

4. Pierre Auguste Renoir earned money for his education аt 21

Pierre Auguste Renoir facts: artist spent four years painting on porcelain. The industrial revolution changed his life: a machine was invented that applied a printed pattern to porcelain, which made him and many other artists unemployed. In 1858, the porcelain workshop where Renoir worked closed:

Then he began painting fans for the ladies and then working on draperies that were used by missionaries in the colonies. He acquired some skills, filled his hand, and quickly learned to use oil paints.

In 1860, he received permission from the authorities to copy paintings in the Louvre. Soon Renoir’s hard work began to bear fruit. By the time he was twenty-one in 1861, he had earned enough money to begin a thorough study of art.

In April 1862, he entered the School of fine arts in Paris. Renoir studied under a number of professors, but his real teacher was Charles Glair. In addition, he attended private classes where Glair taught thirty or forty students to paint or pencil Nudes.

5. Renoir had his own personal opinion about art

Either because of his character or because of the Rococo works that Renoir had copied so often before, he loved the rich, shining colors. This, however, was not very popular at School. Already during the first week of training, there was a collision between Renoir and Glair.

Many years later Renoir commented:

“I tried my best to draw the model. Glair looked at my picture and said in an icy voice and with an icy expression on his face:

-“In all probability, you draw for your own pleasure, isn’t it?”

“Well, of course,” I replied, ” you can be sure I wouldn’t do any of this if I didn’t like to draw…»

“I’m not sure he understood me correctly,” Renoir added.

Perhaps his response was not intended as defiantly as it sounded; nevertheless, he managed to Express his completely new attitude to art – less solemn and less respectful, but more sensual, lively and deeply personal.

6. Refused to participate in exhibitions with the Impressionists

“Madame Charpentier and her children.” It is with this portrait that significant events in his life are associated. Edmond Renoir says that when his brother painted this portrait in the house of Charpentier, “no object was moved from the place it always occupied, nothing was prepared specifically with the expectation of giving significance to this or that part of the picture.”

The interior, decorated with fashionable Japanese screens, the harmony of blue, pink, gold and black made the picture really elegant. Using her social connections, Marguerite Charpentier made sure that this painting was accepted into the Salon, and with it the ceremonial “Portrait of Jeanne Samari”.

For Renoir, this was a success and a promise of new orders. From that moment on, he stopped participating in impressionist exhibitions.

Zola, in an article for Voltaire, explained Renoir’s position as follows: “Monsieur Renoir was the first to realize that you will never get orders in this way (with the help of impressionist exhibitions); and since he had to live, he again began to send his works to the official Salon, for which he was called a renegade.

I am for independence in everything: however, I maintain that Monsieur Renoir’s conduct seems to me perfectly reasonable. You need to know the great advertising opportunities that the official Salon provides to young artists. With our mores, only there can they win a real victory.”

7. Renoir was never very healthy.

Pierre Auguste Renoir facts: he was sick often. Reading his letters, you constantly find references to bronchitis and pneumonia, which kept him in bed for a long time. In 1888, in Essua, half of his face was paralyzed as a result of suffering from neuralgia. And in 1897, Renoir had an accident. In the summer, on a rainy day in Essua, he fell off his bike and broke his right arm.

Fortunately, he learned to write with his left hand after a previous fracture and there was no break in his work. Wife cleaned his palette, washed his brushes, and removed paint from failed sections of the canvas. However, it was this last fall that proved fatal. He began to worry about pain, and the Renoir family’s resident doctor made disappointing predictions about the incurable arthritis that results from such injuries.

Renoir was destined to spend the last twenty years of his life in constant suffering, with the consciousness of complete immobility threatening him, and therefore the inability to work. But in this fragile man there was a fantastic thirst for life and a passion for creativity. It worked until the last moments.

It was painting that kept him alive. Matisse told how Renoir, speaking to him about naked models, called them the highest creation of God:

“Suffering passes… But the beauty remains. I’m perfectly happy, and I won’t die before I finish my masterpiece»

8. He started drawing futures wife 10 years before meet in real life

He often went to the coasts of Normandy and Brittany, and also visited the Cote d’azur and Essois in Burgundy, where Aline Sharigot, a charming little model, lived, whom he married in 1890. But this story started a little earlier, around 1880. At this time, Renoir’s paintings and drawings increasingly show the face of a young girl with round cheeks and a slightly upturned short nose.

Sometimes this face flashes in the crowd on the place Pigalle, leaving a feeling of fleeting happiness. Sometimes her presence is discerned in the image of a red-haired reading girl, sometimes in the lithe figure of a girl getting into a boat.

Finally, in 1881, her portrait appears in the painting “boatmen’s Breakfast”: she is depicted in the lower-left corner of the canvas, in a fancy fashionable hat, with a Pekingese in her hands. Her name was Alin Sharigo, and she was 21 years old in 1880. Renoir met the girl in front of his house in Madame Camille’s dairy on the Rue Saint-Georges.

She lived very close by, with her mother, and earned her living by sewing. Like Renoir, Aline sometimes went to the dairy, where they could have a cheap lunch – usually, it was soup and cheese for dessert. The owner of the dairy wanted to marry one of her daughters to the artist, but fate decreed otherwise.

The mutual attraction between Renoir and Aline was impossible not to notice. Jean Renoir is right when he says that his father began to portray his mother much earlier than they met. Indeed, in many paintings, for example in “the First departure” in 1876, his model is already similar to Alin. Jean says that when Renoir was drawing a profile of Marie Antoinette on a porcelain plate, the owner of the workshop told him:

“Careful! Customers don’t recognize their idol. You should have made your nose longer.”

Outwardly, Aline was strikingly similar to the female type that Renoir created in his work. However, Renoir found much more in it: simplicity and sincerity, which she did not lose when she moved from her native village of Essois to Paris, calmness, sensitivity and understanding of the significance of his work, which the artist needed so much.