Pierre Auguste Renoir Research Paper

Pierre-Auguste Renoir is often cited as one of the founding fathers of the 19th century Impressionist art movement. During the era, he helped to shift the main focus of paintings from famous figures in dramatic scenes to picturesque landscapes with natural lighting. To compliment his more light-hearted subjects, he also adopted a vivid, colorful palette. The name “Impression” stems from the “effect of immediacy which the artist sought, an effect achieved by strong colored and rippled brushwork”. Renoir and his fellow impressionist artists added a broad range of new oils paints and watercolors to the older staple pigments of lead white, Naples yellow, and vermilion. For Renoir, these colors included cobalt blue, French ultramarine, Alizarin

Certain pigments discovered centuries before Renoir’s era were incorporated into his classical art training. From a young age, Renoir learned popular French techniques in school and honed his skills through a four-year apprenticeship at a porcelain factory. He decorated French ceramics with floral styles and painted window coverings to earn extra money. However, through his excellent and fast-paced work, it was soon evident to his family that Renoir was destined to be more than a simple porcelain craftsman. Renoir’s younger brother recalled his talent in a memoir,

After acquiring a blank canvas, Renoir would prime his work with a layer of lead white on a palette knife. This would fill in the weave of the canvas and create a smooth base texture to speed up the drying time of the surface pigments. Quickly after painting the first layer, Renoir would use a technique called alla prima, or wet-on-wet, where he painted thin strokes of his colorful pigments with the lead white to make the colors more fluid and transparent. These qualities, along with lead white’s permanence and shine, have led many to view it as “the greatest of all whites”. In addition to its many benefits, the color was also widely available. It was made by the reaction of vinegar with lead shavings to produce lead carbonate and, in the case of the Dutch process, included buckets of manure to evaporate the acid and provide carbon dioxide. This process kept the prices of lead white paint relatively low, which encouraged artists to use it in almost every painting and sculpture in 19th century