The French painter Pierre Auguste Renoir, b.  Limoges, France, Feb.  25, 1841, d.  Dec.  17, 1919, was one of the founders of IMPRESSIONISM.  Within the impressionist group his work stands out as the most traditional in outlook and technique, as well as the most sensual.

At the age of 13 he began painting flowers on dishware at a porcelain factory and later painted fans and screens.  In 1862 he entered the studio of Charles Gleyre (1808-74) and became friends with Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley, who shared his inclination to take up painting outdoors.  By the time (1869) that he and Monet worked together at La Grenouillere, on the Seine, Renoir had developed a delicate touch and vibrant brushwork that were distinctly his own.
In the early 1870s, Renoir and his friends joined with other avant-garde artists to form a loose-knit artistic circle now known as the impressionist movement.  He participated in the first impressionist exhibition (1874) and throughout the 1870s remained committed to impressionist ideals.  Renoir, however, continued to produce paintings of a more traditional sort, including portraits and scenes of leisure enjoyment, such as Le Moulin de la Galette (1876;  Musee d'Orsay, Paris).  In his portraits and society paintings, Renoir masterfully rendered the shimmering interplay of light and color on surfaces, the prime goal of impressionism, but also kept an underlying sensuality.

Renoir's growing dissatisfaction with the formal restrictions of pure impressionism intensified during a visit (1881-82) to Algiers and Italy.  In response, he made his figures larger and placed them closer to the picture-plane, with a setting treated like a simple backdrop.  This friezelike treatment, best exemplified in his Dance at Bougival (1883;  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), led to his so-called "harsh manner" of the mid-1880s, in which he purified his contours and used frozen, static poses.