50 Fun Facts About Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Which Spanish painter collected seven works by Renoir?

Pablo Picasso. Renoir's late work inspired a younger generation of painters, and the seven Renoirs that Picasso collected went to the Paris museum devoted to him.

In which French city was Renoir born in 1841?

Limoges. Renoir left it as a small child when his father, a tailor, moved the family to Paris, the city where he grew up and learned to paint.

In which French film does a reclusive neighbour repaint Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party year after year?

Amélie. Her brittle-boned neighbour Dufayel has copied the painting for twenty years without ever capturing the girl drinking from a glass, and Amélie comes to see her own loneliness in that figure.

Which French composer taught the young Renoir music before painting won out?

Charles Gounod thought the boy gifted, but at 13 Renoir was apprenticed to paint porcelain, a trade he lost within a few years when printing machines took over the work.

Under which teacher did Renoir study in 1862, meeting Monet, Sisley and Bazille?

Gleyre's Paris studio was the incubator of the Impressionist circle.

Which Renoir painting did the Paris Salon accept in 1868, a year after rejecting his nude Diana?

Lise with a Parasol and the rejected Diana are both thought to show his lover Lise Tréhot: the nude goddess failed with the jury, but the stroller in white muslin with a black parasol got in.

Which Paris museum houses Bal du moulin de la Galette?

Musée d'Orsay. To paint the dance Renoir moved into a run-down cottage a short walk from the mill, and he showed the finished canvas at the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877.

In which Paris district is the Moulin de la Galette of Renoir's 1876 painting?

Montmartre. The windmill's millers sold a small loaf called a galette, which gave the place its name, and on Sunday afternoons working Parisians dressed up to dance in its courtyard.

The smaller Bal du moulin de la Galette sold for $78 million in 1990 to a paper magnate from which country?

Japan. Ryoei Saito bought it the same month he paid a record $82.5 million for a Van Gogh portrait, and he later suggested that both pictures be cremated with him when he died.

Which Washington museum holds Luncheon of the Boating Party?

The Phillips Collection. On buying it in 1923, founder Duncan Phillips wrote that it was one of the greatest paintings in the world and would do more for his young gallery than everything else in it put together.

At which restaurant on the Seine is Luncheon of the Boating Party set?

Maison Fournaise, a boat-hire inn on an island at Chatou, closed early in the 1900s and decayed for decades until the town bought and restored it, and a restaurant reopened there in 1990.

Which future wife of Renoir plays with a small dog in Luncheon of the Boating Party?

Aline Charigot, a dressmaker some twenty years younger than Renoir, began modelling for him around the time of this picture; they married only after their first son had turned five.

Which painter-patron sits backwards in a chair in Luncheon of the Boating Party?

Gustave Caillebotte, a wealthy painter and racing yachtsman, bought his friends' pictures and left them to the French state, naming Renoir his executor; the government balked and took only part of the gift.

Which Veronese banquet scene is thought to have shaped Luncheon of the Boating Party?

The Wedding Feast at Cana was a painting Renoir studied in Paris, where it had hung since Napoleon's army carried it off from a Venetian monastery as war booty in 1797.

Which Boston institution owns Dance at Bougival?

Museum of Fine Arts. Renoir was the son of a tailor and a dressmaker, which is why he lingered over fashions like the red bonnet trimmed with fruit on his nearly life-size dancer.

Which model, later a major painter, probably posed for Dance at Bougival?

Suzanne Valadon was a circus acrobat until a fall from a trapeze ended that career; modelling let her watch painters at work, and she learned enough from them to become one herself.

Which disease crippled Renoir's hands in his final decades?

Rheumatoid arthritis drove him to the warmer south of France, where he settled for good in 1907, and though it deformed his hands and stiffened his shoulder he never stopped painting.

In which Riviera village did Renoir buy the farm Les Collettes?

Cagnes-sur-Mer. Renoir bought Les Collettes for its centuries-old olive grove, which another buyer was said to be ready to cut down, and the town later turned the estate into a museum.

Which young sculptor worked the clay for Renoir's late sculptures?

Richard Guino, a young Catalan sculptor, shaped the clay to Renoir's directions from about 1913; in 1971 a Paris court recognised him as co-author of the works, a ruling upheld on appeal.

Which composer gave Renoir a single short sitting in Palermo in 1882?

Richard Wagner had finished scoring his last opera, Parsifal, only two days earlier, and he granted Renoir one brief sitting: the portrait was done in about 35 minutes.

On which Channel Island did Renoir spend several weeks painting bays and beaches in 1883?

Guernsey. Renoir was charmed by Moulin Huet Bay, where bathers undressed among the rocks for want of cabins, and he wrote that the sight gave him graceful subjects he would be able to use.

Which American collection holds the world's largest group of Renoir paintings?

Barnes Foundation. Albert Barnes bought some 180 Renoirs with a fortune made from Argyrol, an antiseptic he helped devise, and he sold the business only months before the 1929 crash.

Renoir's disciplined 1880s style is sometimes named after which earlier French painter?

Ingres. After seeing Raphael in Italy, Renoir decided he knew neither how to paint nor how to draw, and for several years he outlined his figures so firmly that the phase is also called his dry period.

Which US city's art museum owns The Large Bathers of 1884–87?

Philadelphia. Renoir laboured over the picture for three years and a stack of preparatory drawings, borrowing its bathers from a 17th-century fountain relief in the park at Versailles.

Which New York museum owns Renoir's Madame Charpentier and Her Children?

Metropolitan Museum of Art. The smaller child on the sofa is not a second daughter but her three-year-old son: small boys of the time were dressed just like their sisters.

Asked why he still painted, what did the ailing Renoir reportedly say?

'The pain passes, but the beauty remains' is the reply he is said to have given Henri Matisse, a painter 28 years his junior, who asked why he went on working in such torment.

During which war did Renoir serve in a cavalry regiment posted far from the fighting?

The Franco-Prussian War. He never reached the front, but back in Paris in 1871 he was caught up in the Commune, whose insurgents are said to have taken the painter at his easel for a spy.

With whom did Renoir paint side by side at La Grenouillère in 1869?

Claude Monet. Both were broke, and painting the same floating café from the same spot they gave up black for shadows, colouring them instead with the light reflected from whatever lay around.

Which London institution owns The Umbrellas as part of the Lane Bequest?

National Gallery. Hugh Lane died when the Lusitania was sunk in 1915, leaving an unwitnessed note that switched his bequest to Dublin; after decades of argument the two cities agreed to take turns showing the pictures.

X-rays show that the hatless young woman carrying a hatbox in which Renoir painting once wore a hat?

The Umbrellas. Renoir left the canvas unfinished for about four years; when he came back he repainted her in a plainer, harder-edged style and took away her hat, while the figures on the right kept his earlier soft touch.

Which US museum holds Two Sisters (On the Terrace)?

Art Institute of Chicago. Despite the title, the two were not sisters: Renoir paid unrelated models to pose, and the identity of the younger one in the flowered hat has never been established.

Which dealer gave Two Sisters its alternative title On the Terrace?

Paul Durand-Ruel paid 1,500 francs for it in July 1881. Buying so many Impressionist pictures nearly ruined him, and he said later that only his American exhibitions of 1886 had saved him.

Renoir helped look after Julie Manet, the orphaned teenage daughter of which fellow Impressionist?

Berthe Morisot had married Eugène Manet, brother of the painter Édouard. Her death in 1895 left Julie an orphan at 16: the poet Mallarmé became her guardian, and Renoir was chief among the friends who rallied round.

Which rock singer had himself painted into Renoir's Bal du moulin de la Galette for a 1976 album cover?

Rod Stewart. The sleeve of A Night on the Town redraws the dance with the singer at its centre, and its single Tonight's the Night was at first banned by the BBC yet topped the US chart for eight weeks.

In which Aube village, his wife's birthplace, is Renoir buried?

Essoyes. Renoir died on the Riviera, but the couple had bought a house in her home village in 1896 and spent long stretches there; he lies in its cemetery, as does his film-director son Jean.

A crater named after Renoir lies on which world, whose craters honour artists, writers and composers?

Mercury. Mariner 10, the first spacecraft sent there, returned its first pictures in 1974, and two years later one of the craters it showed was named for Renoir.

Who was Gabrielle Renard, a frequent subject of Renoir's family scenes?

The children's nurse. Gabrielle Renard, a cousin of his wife, joined the household at sixteen just before the second son, Jean, was born, became a frequent model and stayed close to Jean for life.

Which Jean Renoir film was the first foreign-language nominee for Best Picture?

La Grande Illusion. Joseph Goebbels branded the prisoner-of-war drama 'Cinematic Public Enemy No. 1' and ordered its prints seized, and it was banned in Germany and then in Italy.

Renoir's 1867 portrait shows which friend and studio-mate at his easel, painting a dead heron?

Frédéric Bazille. The two shared a studio and painted each other that year, and Renoir's canvas now hangs in Montpellier, Bazille's home town, beside the heron still life it shows him painting.

Which Impressionist, born in Paris to British parents, shared a studio with the young Renoir?

Alfred Sisley lived and worked in France yet had to ask to be French: he applied for citizenship twice, the first request failed and his final illness cut the second short.

Knowing the French state meant to buy one, Renoir painted five or six versions of which 1892 scene?

Girls at the Piano. Renoir kept repainting the two girls until he was sure of his first official purchase; the chosen canvas went to the Luxembourg museum, and other versions now hang in Paris and New York.

Which newspaper's 1876 critic likened a Renoir nude's torso to decomposing flesh?

Le Figaro. Its critic Albert Wolff was reviewing the second Impressionist exhibition, and the study he ridiculed, a nude dappled by sunlight, now hangs in a French national museum.

A woman claimed she paid just $7 for a stolen Renoir landscape at what kind of sale?

A flea market in West Virginia, by her account. The little riverside view had been stolen from the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1951, so the 2012 auction was called off and the painting belongs to the museum again.

Which dealer published La Vie et l'Œuvre de Pierre-Auguste Renoir in 1919?

Ambroise Vollard did more than write about him: around 1913 the dealer talked the ailing painter into trying sculpture, then found and paid a young sculptor to do the modelling.

Which country that Delacroix had painted did Renoir visit twice in the early 1880s?

Algeria. Renoir had painted the country before he ever saw it: years earlier, in homage to Delacroix, he dressed Paris models in Algerian costume for a harem scene.

Renoir introduced which painter to the collector Victor Chocquet, who became that artist's most loyal buyer?

Paul Cézanne. Chocquet, a customs official, bought three of his canvases in 1875 on Renoir's recommendation and kept commissioning him, which eased the painter's money worries for years.

Which Spanish master, whom he deeply admired, did Renoir go to Madrid to see?

Velázquez. Renoir ranked him with Raphael and Rubens among the old masters he most admired, and around the 1880s he went to find them where they hung, travelling through Italy, Holland, Spain, England and Germany.

Renoir's patron Paul Bérard often hosted him at the seaside Château de Wargemont in which region of France?

Normandy. Renoir spent several summers with the Bérards near Dieppe, painting portraits of their four children and decorating the dining room, where his painted panels are now a protected monument.

Through which museum was Renoir wheeled in 1919?

The Louvre. As a teenage apprentice he used to slip away from the porcelain workshop to haunt its galleries, and at 78 he was wheeled past the old masters he had revered all his life.

Top-hatted Charles Ephrussi in Luncheon of the Boating Party is central to which family memoir?

The Hare with Amber Eyes. Edmund de Waal's 2010 memoir follows the Japanese netsuke carvings that Ephrussi, an art editor and collector, gathered in the same Paris years he was buying Impressionist pictures.