An Impressionable Birthday
It’s the birthday of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges, France (1841). He was born into a family of artisans. His father was a tailor and his mother a dressmaker. He showed an early talent for drawing, and so he was apprenticed to a porcelain painter when he was just thirteen years old. He might have spent the rest of his life decorating plates with bouquets of flowers, but he decided early on that he wanted to be a real painter.
… You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat…
He saved up his own money to take evening classes in drawing and anatomy. He didn’t learn much from his teachers, but a group of his classmates introduced him to a new idea that art should try to be closer to life and free from past tradition. One of these classmates was Claude Monet and the idea they’d come up with would become known as Impressionism.
At the time, paintings were produced in studios and they were painstakingly sketched out before the painter even began to put any color on the canvas. But Renoir and his friends began to travel out into the countryside with their canvases. They were among the first professional painters in the world to paint directly from nature, painting straight onto the canvas.
The first exhibition of these Impressionist paintings came in 1874, and they created a stir in the art world, but many art critics thought they were ugly and amateurish. But they eventually caught on.
Renoir said, “In painting, as in the other arts, there’s not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat”.
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