Pierre-Auguste Renoir and his family

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges on the 25th  February 1841. His father, Léonard Renoir, was a tailor and his mother, Marguerite Merlet, was a dressmaker. The Renoir family moved to Paris in 1845 in the hope of finding work more easily. When he was 13, the painter started working in a porcelain factory to paint designs on china. This job allowed him to contribute to the family’s expenses.

He became a copyist at the Louvre Museum and then a student at the École Impériale et Spéciale des Beaux-Arts. He began studying art under Charles Gleyres. There he met other artists like Monet, Bazille and Sisley with whom he became friends. He found his own artistic style while admiring Ingres’s, Delacroix’s and Manet’s paintings..		 les-renoir
Exhibiting at the Salon organised every year in Paris used to be a proof of excellence for any artist. Renoir struggled before he could enter it as his paintings were not conventional enough according to the jury. He was first selected in 1864 thanks to “La Esmeralda”, but this did not mean he would be automatically selected for the following years. Renoir had to face a lot of rejection, until he met Lise Tréhot, a live model who enabled him to achieve success on several occasions.
les-renoir2 In 1874, the Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs (Association of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers) organised the first impressionist exhibition. Some of Renoir’s, Monet’s, Degas’s, Pissarro’s, Cézanne’s and Berthe Morisot’s works were exhibited in a place on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. On this occasion, a journalist named the artists “Impressionists”. This name was inspired by the title of a famous Monet work, “Impression, Sunrise” (“Impression, soleil levant”).

Renoir was in need and therefore worked on many portrait orders. He managed to live of his artistic activities mainly thanks to private buyers (including Paul Durand-Ruel) purchasing his paintings.

In Paris, he met a young provincial, Aline Victorine Charigot, who was born in Essoyes. Attracted by the beauty of the young curvaceous woman, who was eighteen years his junior, the artist asked her to pose for him. She first became his live model, then his wife and the mother of his three sons, Pierre, Jean and Claude.
In 1885, she naturally dragged her husband to Essoyes. Renoir was entirely won over and enchanted by the landscapes and the villagers’ way of life and he came back there every summer with his family. The family house was bought in 1896 and accommodated not only the Renoir family but also many of their friends. The painter found his inspiration and live models for his paintings in the Champagne region through the village laundrywomen, his children and Gabrielle Renard, a young woman from Essoyes who became Jean’s nurse and above all the master’s favourite live model.

After many years of hard work, his reputation was finally established once and for all; Renoir was more and more successful. Despite a partial paralysis, he carried on painting and even tried his hand at sculpture, first assisted by Richard Guino and then by Louis Morel.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir died in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1919, four years after his wife. Both were buried in the Essoyes cemetery according to their wish. The painter’s works are exhibited in the most famous museums; Renoir is now renowned all over the world.