Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1896 - The Artist's Family (The artist's family) - fine art print

(© Copyright - by Barnes Foundation - Barnes Foundation)

Painted in 1896, The Artist's Family is Renoir's largest portrait, with life-size figures represented in full length, all of whom have an imposing monumentality. The canvas shows Renoir's wife, Aline, standing at the center, with their 11-year-old son, Pierre, leaning affectionately against her. A two-year-old Jean Renoir toddles in the foreground, attended by the beloved nursemaid Gabrielle Renard; the third son, Claude, was not born until 1901. According to Arsene Alexandre, who claims to have witnessed Renoir at work on the painting, the girl standing opposite Pierre is "simply a little neighbor"; she has also been identified as the daughter of the writer Paul Alexis, who lived next door, and as Marie Isembart.The group is posed in the courtyard in front of 13, rue Girardon, opposite the Chateau de Brouillards in Montmartre, where the Renoir family had moved in 1890. The trees and grassy expanse opening up behind the figures convey the relatively rural character of the Butte de Montmartre during the 1890s; and yet at the same time the bucolic setting seems somewhat exaggerated, as the field stretches on a bit too far, and any sense of the city of Paris, vistas of which are inescapable from that area, is entirely eclipsed. Renoir has clearly idealized his Montmartre neighborhood, presenting it as a rural village rather than as a rapidly developing part of the city.Though Renoir made many paintings of his wife and sons individually, this is his only attempt to present them all together. There is a palpable warmth between the figures, who exchange fond glances and make nonchalant physical contact, as Pierre loops his arms around that of his mother, while the young Jean clutches Gabrielle's sleeve. In its hierarchical presentation of the figures—Madame Renoir presides, while the nursemaid occupies a lower register—Renoir is drawing upon the conventions of 17th-century group portraiture, looking especially to Diego Velazquez, whose Las Meninas he had seen during an 1892 trip to Madrid, and to Anthony Van Dyck. If the arrangement asserts the Renoir family's social status, this is reinforced through the clothing. While Pierre sports a sailor suit that is "customarily worn by sons of the well-to-do," as Colin Bailey has observed, Madame Renoir, who wears a splendid hat and gloves and carries a fur-collared coat, seems to be trying on her newly acquired bourgeois identity. John House notes that following Renoir and Aline's marriage in1890, the Renoir family had become more respectable in the eyes of their bourgeois friends, which this painting certainly reflects; but the inclusion of the neighbor's daughter also suggests the more informal, bohemian circle of which they were a part in Montmartre.While the hierarchical presentation of the figures is symbolic of the various positions within the family, it is also a reflection of Renoir's concern for compositional balance: the heads are arranged in a near-perfect circle—a shape that repeats several times, in the hats and in the ball behind the girl's back. Black and dark blue accents are distributed at even intervals throughout the group's clothing. Even the gazes, especially that between Pierre and the girl, function as part of Renoir's highly designed geometry, as its path locks the two sides of the circle together. By creating such a tightly composed picture, Renoir was surely intending to emphasize the stability of the family unit. It seems very likely that he would have made many studies in preparation for this canvas, especially in light of the important role of drawing in his work from the 1890s. Yet none of these studies seems to exist; only a drawing of Pierre's head might possibly relate to the large canvas.Martha Lucy, Renoir in the Barnes Foundation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 147-48.

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In 1896 the male painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir made this artpiece The Artist's Family (The artist's family). The version of the artwork measures the size - Overall: 68 1/8 x 54 in (173 x 137,2 cm) and was made with oil on canvas. What is more, the work of art can be viewed in in the Barnes Foundation's collection, which home to one of the world's greatest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist and early modernist paintings. With courtesy of - Courtesy of the Barnes Foundation, Merion and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (public domain license).: . Furthermore, alignment is portrait with an image ratio of 1 : 1.2, which implies that the length is 20% shorter than the width. Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a illustrator, painter, sculptor of French nationality, whose style can be attributed primarily to Impressionism. The Impressionist artist lived for a total of 78 years - born in 1841 in Limoges, Nouvelle-Aquitaine, France and deceased in 1919 in Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur, France.

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