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RENOIR, Pierre Auguste, French painter born in Limoges, France, Feb. 25, 1841 and died in Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Nice, Dec. 17, 1919. A skilled painter of porcelain, he was lucky when the machine made hand-painted china obsolete. After a period of painting window blinds in 1862, he entered the studio of Charles Gabriel Gleyre, where he met Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Frederic Bazille, the last of whom introduced him to-Camille Pissarro. Thus were the founding fathers of impressionism gathered together a dozen years before the formal launching of the movement. Most of them were 21 or 22; Pissarro, the eldest, was 32.

Leaving Gleyre's after a year, Renoir was much influenced by Monet, whom he saw often until the middle 1870's. His pictures were occasionally accepted by the Paris Salon, Corot being among his early admirers. He exhibited at the first three impressionist shows but in 1879 returned to the official Salon, without, however, offending his friends. In 1890 he exhibited at the Salon for the last time. From 1883, after his successful one-man show at Durand-Ruel's, this gallery handled any canvases that Renoir cared to send it. As early as 1882, on his way back from Italy, he had his first attack of rheumatoid gout, a lifelong enemy that finally twisted his body and so attacked his painting hand (1912) that his brush had to be strapped to it. But he was not a hopeless invalid; he was a hopeful one. To the grim formula for man's fate-"He was born, he suffered, he died"-Renoir would have added, before the last element: "He loved life." For life, indeed, he had a genius. In 1916, after his beloved wife's death, he found a model who inspired over 100 great paintings. Almost until the very end he frenziedly painted, delighted but never satisfied.
Unlike his friend Monet, Renoir was the least doctrinaire of artists. A sane shying away from absolutes allowed him to make those compromises with the world which kept a roof over his head without costing him his self-respect. He did not particularly enjoy portraiture, but his portraits are so full of his love of life that they are inevitably charming. A picture like Mme. Charpentier and Her Children (1878), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, is an invaluable document of comfortable bourgeois life in the early days of the Third Republic. After 1883, Renoir no longer had to busy himself with specific characterization, which to an adventurous painter might well have seemed a dead end.

In the very last year of his life, Renoir had his wheel chair drawn through the Louvre. As the triumphal tour proceeded, on his part he did homage to the great ones who had influenced him: Courbet, Manet, Delacroix, Raphael, Rubens, the Venetians, the French masters of the 18th century, and many another. He was too learned a painter to pursue anything beyond the point of most ample reward. Thus he abandoned impressionism after his Italian journey (1881-1882), when he was taught by Raphael to turn decisively to composition, an aspect of painting for which the impressionists could spare no time. From then on he became a classicist, exploring linear rhythms and monumental design. To master line, and to give it added definition while he was learning, he temporarily despoiled his palette of its most ravishing hues. He called this brief period his "harsh manner"; others have called it "Ingresesque." He soon returned to his more typical vibrant-colored texture. In his latter days, he confined himself chiefly to women, children, flowers. His radiant bathers are as specifically unidentifiable as figures from a Greek frieze of the great period. Working tirelessly and independently, Renoir seems, perhaps not strangely, to have attacked problems in much the same way as artists as disparate as Cezanne and Seurat were doing at the same time.

Renoir's enormous output is well represented in leading galleries as well as in many private collections. Aside from the Louvre, outstanding examples are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago; the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa.; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In England, the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, and the Courtauld Institute of Art, all in London, possess fine examples. One of Renoir's rare bronzes, The Washerwoman (1917), is in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.