Pierre-Auguste Renoir

The English writer George Moore, thought Renoir possessed a certain 'vulgarity', a feeling expressed, though not of course explicitly, by Renoir himself, whose eventual fame sat uneasily on th ehead of a self-confessed artisan. Renoir was existentially nervy, a source of perpetual motion who would whistle incessantly whilst painting and fall into utter depression when idle. His dissatisfaction with the extraordinary surface effects of his 'Impressionist' period culminated in a search for classical simplicity in line and volume which lead him back to teh work of Raphael, and to the experiments of Cezanne. In the end he found his metier in the female figure.