Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Renoir learned to paint on porcelain. As a boy in Paris in the 1850s he was apprenticed to a china factory, painting flowers and figures onto plates and cups until machines took over the work, and that early training in light, quick, decorative color stayed in everything he did. In the 1870s he became one of the core Impressionists, painting Parisians dancing and drinking in the dappled sunlight of open-air cafés.

Where other painters chased hardship or drama, Renoir kept insisting a picture should be pleasant to look at. He once said there was already enough that was unpleasant in the world. His crowds, his nudes, and his portraits stay warm and full of movement across four decades of work.

From about 1892 rheumatoid arthritis slowly crippled his hands. He moved south to the warmer air of Cagnes-sur-Mer, near the Mediterranean, and in his last years worked from a wheelchair with his fingers badly deformed, an assistant setting the brush into his grip so he could go on. He painted almost until his death in 1919. One of his sons, Jean Renoir, grew up to become one of the great film directors, and later wrote a tender book about his father's life.