December 2, 2019

Tomorrow, December 3, marks 100 years since the death of the celebrated French artist Pierre Auguste Renoir in 1919. Renoir, an Impressionist painter, was famous for his pictures of young girls and children and intimate portraits of French middle-class life. He loved to show lively groups in sensuous surroundings. He often used his friends as models and frequently painted his wife and children.

The French artist Pierre Auguste Renoir died 100 years ago on Dec. 3, 1919. Credit: National Library of France

Art museums around the world highlighted their collections of Renoir works to mark the centenary of the artist’s death. In the United States, a special exhibit, “Renoir: the Body, the Senses,” was held at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts during the summer. The exhibit then moved to the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas, where it is showing until January 2020.

Madame Georges Charpentier and her Children by Pierre Auguste Renoir. Credit: Madame Georges Charpentier and her Children (1878), oil on canvas by Auguste Renoir; Metropolitan Museum of Art

In the 1870′s, Renoir and Claude Monet together developed the broken color technique of the Impressionists. Instead of mixing paints completely, they left small dabs of color in a sketchy manner. But Renoir was more interested in rich color effects and a sense of volume than Monet. Renoir also preferred figure painting to landscapes. During the 1870′s, he painted a large number of portraits on commission. Perhaps his most famous is Mme. Charpentier and Her Children. Many Impressionists brought Japanese qualities into their work. However, Renoir revived the rococo style of such artists as Francois Boucher and Jean Honore Fragonard.

The Swing, an Impressionist painting by Renoir, shows the effects of sunlight on figures set against an outdoor background. Credit: Oil painting on canvas (1876), Musee d’Orsay, Paris; Giraudon/Art Resource

Renoir visited Italy in 1881 and 1882. His study of Renaissance painters there led him to a new appreciation of the importance of line. He returned to France, where he gave up his broad, coloristic manner and spent several years concentrating on drawing. Renoir painted a famous series, The Bathers, during this time.

The happy quality of Renoir’s later work does not show the agony he suffered from arthritis, which finally crippled his hands. He had brushes tied to his hands and developed a final style of painting in broad brush strokes and vivid colors.

Renoir was born in Limoges, France, on Feb. 25, 1841. He was apprenticed to learn porcelain painting after he showed an early talent for drawing. He painted window shades and fans in Paris. He studied at Charles Gleyre’s studio. There, he met Monet and other young painters who were to form the Impressionist group. He was influenced also by Édouard Manet and the color methods of Eugene Delacroix. Renoir’s three sons were also artists, the most famous of whom was the film director Jean Renoir.

November 5, 2013

A cache of long-lost art treasures, some of it stolen by the Nazis, has been discovered hidden behind out-of-date canned goods in a shabby apartment in Munich, Germany. The approximately 1,480 paintings and prints by such famous artists as Chagall, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec are estimated to be worth $1.35 billion. Not all of the artwork is modern. There are also Canalettos and a Courbet in the collection. German art expert Meike Hoffmann described some of works as dirty but undamaged. “The pictures are of exceptional quality and have very special value for art experts,” he noted. “Many works were unknown until now.”

The collection was in the possession of Cornelius Gurlitt. His father, art dealer Hildebrandt Gurlitt, amassed much of it during the 1930′s and 1940′s at what the senior Gurlitt himself said were “shamefully low prices” from Jews desperately trying to raise funds to get out of Nazi Germany. The rest, having been labeled “degenerate” by Adolf Hitler, had been seized by the Nazis. How these works got into Gulitt’s possession is unknown. After World War II, the elder Gurlitt allegedly claimed that his collection had been destroyed during the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945. He died in car accident in 1956.

(c) Gisele Freund, Photo Researchers

German authorities seized the cache during a raid on Cornelius Gurlitt’s Munich flat in March 2011. Gurlitt had become the target of a tax evasion investigation after he was discovered carrying some $12,000 in cash on a train from Zurich, Switzerland, to Munich in 2010. Prosecutors said the issue of ownership of the art was still being clarified. Some legal experts believe that the descendants of the original owners may be able to make claims on individual pieces. Others note that the art taken in Germany itself may not be reclaimable because of a 30-year statute of limitations.

Additional World Book articles:

• Max Beckmann
• Germany 1933 (a Back in Time article)
• Germany 1935 (a Back in Time article)
• Germany 1938 (a Back in Time article)