Renoir, born in Limoges on February 25 1841, worked as a child in a porcelain factory in Paris, painting designs on china. At 17 he copied paintings on fans, lampshades, and blinds and studied painting formally in 1862-63 at the academy of the Swiss painter Charles Gabriel Gleyre in Paris. Renoir's early work was influenced by two French artists, Claude Monet in his treatment of light and the painter Eugène Delacroix in his treatment of color.

His first exhibition was in Paris in 1864, but gained recognition not before 1874, at the first exhibition of painters of the new impressionist school. One of the most famous of all impressionist works is Renoir's "Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette" (1876, Louvre, Paris, 1. pict.) , an open-air scene of a café, in which his mastery in figure painting and in representing light is evident. Renoir fully established his reputation with a solo exhibition held at the Durand-Ruel Gallery in Paris in 1883. Outstanding examples of his talents as a portraitist are "Madame Charpentier and Her Children" (1878, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) and Jeanne Samary (1879, Louvre, Paris). The second painting on this page shows the "Luncheon of the Boating Party" (1881, coll. Durand-Ruel).

During the last 20 years of his life Renoir was crippled by arthritis; unable to move his hands freely, he continued to paint, however, by using a brush strapped to his arm. Renoir died at Cagnes-sur-Mer, a village in the south of France, on December 3, 1919.