Renoir

Fülszöveg

Anyone who has visited an art gallery will
understand the value of being able to look
at paintings close up, to see the way the colors
have been used and how the paint has been
handled. Now you can have your own personal
art gallery in this series of books, The History
and Techniques of the Great Masters. Each book
brings you a selection of ten or more famous
paintings, magnificently reproduced in full color,
and with actual size details so that you can see
the way the artist has worked — just as though
the paintings were hanging on your own walls.
The text analyzes each painting in turn, and
informative captions tell you exactly which
techniques the artist has used to obtain
particular effects, what type of canvas and
priming was used, and how the colors were
chosen, mixed and applied.
Pierre-Auguste Renoirs delightful paintings, the result
of a direct, unintellectual approach and an
instinctive feeling for his medium, have always held a
special place in the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Anyone who has visited an art gallery will
understand the value of being able to look
at paintings close up, to see the way the colors
have been used and how the paint has been
handled. Now you can have your own personal
art gallery in this series of books, The History
and Techniques of the Great Masters. Each book
brings you a selection of ten or more famous
paintings, magnificently reproduced in full color,
and with actual size details so that you can see
the way the artist has worked — just as though
the paintings were hanging on your own walls.
The text analyzes each painting in turn, and
informative captions tell you exactly which
techniques the artist has used to obtain
particular effects, what type of canvas and
priming was used, and how the colors were
chosen, mixed and applied.
Pierre-Auguste Renoirs delightful paintings, the result
of a direct, unintellectual approach and an
instinctive feeling for his medium, have always held a
special place in the aifections of the art-loving public,
and today he is one of the best-known and most
popular of all the Impressionist painters. A simple
and sincere man, he had little time for theories about
art, declaring that a thing of beauty needed no
commentary. Unlike most of his contemporaries, who
came from middle-class backgrounds, Renoir was of
humble origins, the son of a tailor, and in his youth
he was apprenticed as a porcelain painter. This early
training probably influenced his taste for light and
transparent colors as well as his devotion to the craft
aspect of painting, which he saw as a form of skilled
labor, handling his materials with the same degree
of thought and care that a master cabinetmaker
would lavish on the preparation of woods and
veneers. Although he attained recognition as a major
artist towards the middle of his life, success came
slowly, and the hardships of his early life were
considerable. Yet from the moment he decided to
make his career as a painter, a brush was always in
his hands, just as it was in his old age, when his
arthritis had become so acute that his paints had to
be mixed for him by a member of his family.
Although Renoir's earlier work has much in
common with that of the other Impressionists, he
gradually developed his own very personal style,
which owes as much to the Old Masters and
eighteenth-century painters as to his contemporaries.
The selection of paintings shown here has been
carefully chosen to illustrate this change in style,
from the lovely, light-dappled outdoor scenes such as
The Swing and Ball at the Moulin de la Galette to the
ambitious later works like Les Grandes Baigneuses.
The text outlines the major events in his Life and
explains the formative influences on his work. Vissza