Bal du moulin de la Galette. Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Public domain · source

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Public domain1841-1919·French·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Born in Limoges on 25 February 1841, he died at Cagnes-sur-Mer on 3 December 1919, aged 78. At thirteen he left school to be apprenticed at a porcelain factory, decorating ceramics, before he trained as a painter. A painter of people at leisure - dances, boating lunches, children, bathers - and in later life a lithographer and, with an assistant, a sculptor.

Why they matter

He painted pleasure without irony: a Sunday crowd dancing at the Moulin de la Galette in 1876, a boating party at lunch in 1880-81, two sisters on a terrace. He made Impressionist light a setting for people. When rheumatoid arthritis took hold of him from around 1892 he went on painting for nearly three decades - not, as the story goes, with a brush strapped to his hand, but with an assistant placing the brush in it.

What to buy

Prints: the National Gallery in London makes prints to order from its own photography of its Renoirs - The Umbrellas, At the Theatre, The Skiff and others - and that is the source to use. Books: the catalogue raisonne of the paintings is the five-volume Dauberville catalogue published by Bernheim-Jeune (1983-2014); his prints are catalogued by Loys Delteil (1923), in the volume he shares with Pissarro and Sisley. Originals: his lithographs, published by Ambroise Vollard and printed by Auguste Clot, are where an original Renoir is realistic. The best known, Le Chapeau epingle (second plate, about 1898), was issued in 200 impressions in different colour variations, signed in the stone; some sheets also carry a stamped signature. Neither is a hand signature, and neither should be sold as one. Be exact with the etchings: Vollard published some with hand colouring in watercolour in 1919, and his heirs reprinted them from 1986 onward. A hand-coloured Renoir etching may be one of those late reprints rather than a lifetime impression; ask which it is, and ask for the Delteil number.

Notes

Bal du moulin de la Galette and Girls at the Piano (1892) are at the Musee d'Orsay, Luncheon of the Boating Party at the Phillips Collection in Washington, The Large Bathers in Philadelphia. Bronze casts of the Venus Victrix are at Tate and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Story

In his last years Renoir, whose rheumatoid arthritis meant someone had to place the brush in his hand, became a sculptor. Tate owns a bronze Venus Victorious modelled in 1914. He did not shape the clay himself.

In 1913 the dealer Ambroise Vollard, who had admired a medallion Renoir made, found him a young Catalan sculptor, Richard Guino, whom Aristide Maillol had discovered at an exhibition in Barcelona in 1910 and brought to Paris. Vollard paid Guino's wages himself. From 1913 to 1918, first at Essoyes and then at Les Collettes, Renoir's villa at Cagnes, the painter worked at his canvas upstairs while Guino modelled clay in a studio in the garden. Out of it came the Small Venus, the Venus Victrix, the Judgement of Paris and the Large Washerwoman.

Renoir died in 1919, and from that year the Hebrard gallery issued the sculptures in bronze editions. Nearly half a century later, in 1965, Guino's son Michel, himself a sculptor, went to court. In 1971 the Tribunal de Paris recognised Richard Guino as co-author of the sculptures, and the case was settled on appeal in 1973.

The sculptures of Renoir, the court decided, were not by Renoir alone: the hands that made them were Guino's, more than half a century before the law caught up.

Key works

Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) - Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children (1878) - The Met, New York
Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-1881) - The Phillips Collection, Washington
Two Sisters (On the Terrace) (1881) - Art Institute of Chicago
The Umbrellas (c. 1880-1886) - National Gallery, London
The Large Bathers (1884-1887) - Philadelphia Museum of Art

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

Originals

See also