Pierre-Auguste Renoir
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50 free Pierre-Auguste Renoir trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir left school at thirteen to paint porcelain, nearly got thrown into the Seine as a spy during the Commune, and finished his career on the Riviera with bandaged hands, still insisting the beauty remains. In between he painted some of the most reproduced pictures in the world. These 50 questions cover the life and the canvases: the porcelain apprenticeship, Charles Gleyre's studio where he met Monet, the first Impressionist exhibition, the Moulin de la Galette and The Swing painted in the same Montmartre garden, and the Maison Fournaise terrace at Chatou that gave us Luncheon of the Boating Party and Two Sisters. You will meet the models and patrons, from Lise Tréhot and Suzanne Valadon to Aline Charigot, Caillebotte and Durand-Ruel, and the family that followed: actor Pierre, filmmaker Jean, ceramicist Claude. Easy questions cover museums and movements; the hard tier asks about Wagner's 35-minute portrait, Guernsey, the Baltimore theft and the Commune leader who saved his life. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Spanish painter collected seven works by Renoir?
Pablo Picasso
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.
Q 02In which French city was Renoir born in 1841?
Limoges
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.
Q 03In which French film does a reclusive neighbour repaint Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party year after year?
Amélie
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.
Q 04Which French composer taught the young Renoir music before painting won out?
Charles Gounod
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.
Q 05Under which teacher did Renoir study in 1862, meeting Monet, Sisley and Bazille?
Charles Gleyre
Gleyre's Paris studio was the incubator of the Impressionist circle.
Q 06Which Renoir painting did the Paris Salon accept in 1868, a year after rejecting his nude Diana?
Lise with a Parasol
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.
Q 07Which Paris museum houses Bal du moulin de la Galette?
Musée d'Orsay
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.
Q 08In which Paris district is the Moulin de la Galette of Renoir's 1876 painting?
Montmartre
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.
Q 09The smaller Bal du moulin de la Galette sold for $78 million in 1990 to a paper magnate from which country?
Japan
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.
Q 10Which Washington museum holds Luncheon of the Boating Party?
The Phillips Collection
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.
Q 11At which restaurant on the Seine is Luncheon of the Boating Party set?
Maison Fournaise
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.
Q 12Which future wife of Renoir plays with a small dog in Luncheon of the Boating Party?
Aline Charigot
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.
Q 13Which painter-patron sits backwards in a chair in Luncheon of the Boating Party?
Gustave Caillebotte
Q 21On which Channel Island did Renoir spend several weeks painting bays and beaches in 1883?
Guernsey
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.
Q 22Which American collection holds the world's largest group of Renoir paintings?
Barnes Foundation
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.
Q 23Renoir's disciplined 1880s style is sometimes named after which earlier French painter?
Ingres
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.
Q 14Which Veronese banquet scene is thought to have shaped Luncheon of the Boating Party?
The Wedding Feast at Cana
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.
Q 15Which Boston institution owns Dance at Bougival?
Museum of Fine Arts
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.
Q 16Which model, later a major painter, probably posed for Dance at Bougival?
Suzanne Valadon
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.
Q 17Which disease crippled Renoir's hands in his final decades?
Rheumatoid arthritis
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.
Q 18In which Riviera village did Renoir buy the farm Les Collettes?
Cagnes-sur-Mer
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.
Q 19Which young sculptor worked the clay for Renoir's late sculptures?
Richard Guino
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.
Q 20Which composer gave Renoir a single short sitting in Palermo in 1882?
Richard Wagner
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.
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.
Q 24Which US city's art museum owns The Large Bathers of 1884–87?
Philadelphia
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.
Q 25Which New York museum owns Renoir's Madame Charpentier and Her Children?
Metropolitan Museum of Art
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.
Q 26Asked why he still painted, what did the ailing Renoir reportedly say?
The pain passes, but the beauty remains
'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.
Q 27During which war did Renoir serve in a cavalry regiment posted far from the fighting?
Franco-Prussian War
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.
Q 28With whom did Renoir paint side by side at La Grenouillère in 1869?
Claude Monet
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.
Q 29Which London institution owns The Umbrellas as part of the Lane Bequest?
National Gallery
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.
Q 30X-rays show that the hatless young woman carrying a hatbox in which Renoir painting once wore a hat?
The Umbrellas
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.