Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Impressionist of warmth, movement and radiant skin, best known for his scenes of middle-class Parisian leisure — picnics, dances, boating parties — painted with a visual pleasure that is almost physical. Renoir began his working life as a porcelain painter in Limoges, and the decorative instinct of that early training — the pleasure in smooth, rounded surfaces, the delight in pattern and colour — never entirely left his canvases. He co-founded the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, and his Moulin de la Galette (1876) and Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81) are among the movement's defining images of modern sociability. In the early 1880s he broke with strict Impressionism, traveling to Italy where Raphael and the frescoes of Pompeii pushed him toward firmer outlines and a more classical figure style — the period his critics called his manière aigre (sour manner), which he himself later repudiated. The late work, increasingly concentrated on the female nude and on bathers in open air, was produced under progressively worsening rheumatoid arthritis. By his final years his hands were so deformed that brushes had to be strapped to them. He kept painting anyway, producing some of his most sensual canvases from a wheelchair in his studio at Cagnes-sur-Mer. Renoir died in 1919 at seventy-eight, having outlasted most of his generation. His work has never lacked for buyers — even during the periods when critical opinion turned against its sunlit ease — and his output of approximately six thousand canvases means that his paintings are among the most widely distributed of any major painter in the world's public and private collections.