Eternally captivating, the paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) are the embodiment of happiness, love and beauty. This comprehensive retrospective in a compact edition examines in detail the personal history of the painter and the motivations behind the legend . Although he began his career painting landscapes in the Impressionist style, Renoir found his true calling in portraiture, after which he abandoned the style altogether. Despite often being misunderstood, Renoir remains one of the most beloved painters in history, no doubt because of the warmth, tenderness, and joie de vivre that his paintings exude.
In this masterful text that details the artist's entire career and traces his stylistic evolution, Gilles Néret shows how Renoir reinvented the forms of women in painting through his everyday goddesses with pronounced curves, hips and breasts. The last phase in Renoir's work, in which he returned to the simple pleasure of painting the female nude through his series of bathers, was his most innovative and stylistically influential, and would go on to inspire masters such as Matisse and Picasso.
With a complete chronology, bibliography, index of works, and splendid color reproductions, as well as photos and sketches illustrating Renoir's life and work, this is the essential reference book on this master painter .
Author: Gilles Neret
Binding: Hardcover with dust jacket.
Format: 15 x 20 cm
Pages: 488
