Artists

Pierre-Auguste Renoir Art Prints

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)

7 museum-quality prints of works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, each made to order on archival paper and shipped to your wall.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges in 1841 and apprenticed at thirteen as a painter in a Parisian porcelain factory — a decorative training whose delicacy never left his touch. With Monet and Sisley, fellow students in Charles Gleyre’s studio, he helped forge Impressionism in the 1860s and 1870s, though his deepest subject was always the human figure rather than pure landscape: Parisians at leisure, women, and children, painted with dissolved contours and high-keyed color, as in Woman at the Piano (1875–76) and The Laundress (1877–79).

Two Sisters (On the Terrace) (1881), set at the Restaurant Fournaise on the Seine at Chatou and shown at the Impressionist exhibition of 1882, marks a turning point: the faces rendered with porcelain-smooth precision against a freely brushed backdrop. A trip to Italy that same year, and the example of Raphael and Titian, convinced Renoir he had “gone as far as I could with Impressionism,” and his later work returned to firmer drawing and classical composition.