Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Impressionist of warmth and movement, celebrated for portraits, leisure scenes, and luminous skin tones. Renoir began as a porcelain painter in Limoges, and the decorative palette of that work never quite left him. He was a co-founder of the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 but later broke with strict Impressionism, traveling to Italy to study Raphael and Pompeian frescoes and reintroducing firmer drawing and classical composition to his work. Severe rheumatoid arthritis crippled his hands in the last twenty years of his life; he kept painting by having brushes strapped to his fingers and producing some of his most sensual, fleshly canvases from a wheelchair.