Pierre-Auguste Renoir Art Prints

Born in Limoges, the son of a tailor, he grew up in Paris a short walk from the Louvre, and when the porcelain factory switched to mechanical reproduction in 1858 he had to find other work. In Charles Gleyre's studio in 1862 he met Sisley, Bazille and Monet, and in the 1860s there were times he could not afford paint. In 1869 he and Monet set up their easels side by side at La Grenouillère, a floating restaurant and boat-hire on the Seine.

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880–81) is a group portrait of his circle on a restaurant balcony at Chatou. Look for the woman at lower left playing with a small dog: she is Aline Charigot, whom he married in 1890. The painter Gustave Caillebotte sits backwards on his chair at lower right, and the railing's diagonal splits a crowded half from an almost empty one. In The Swing (1876), painted in a Montmartre garden, the ground is flecked with pink, white and lavender blossoms, and patches of pale colour make the light quiver across the clothes. Caillebotte bought it soon after it was shown in 1877.

Then came a crisis. A trip to Italy in 1881, and the Raphaels he saw there, convinced him he had gone as far as he could with Impressionism. On the same travels he met Richard Wagner in Palermo and painted his portrait in thirty-five minutes. The Large Bathers (1884–87) shows the result in one canvas: the two big nudes on the left were traced from exact drawings and look almost sculpted, while the landscape and small bathers behind them are loose and shimmering.

Rheumatoid arthritis set in around 1892, and in 1907 he moved to a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer, where he kept painting until his death in 1919. The story that a brush was strapped to his hand is wrong: he could still grip one, though an assistant had to place it there.