Renoir

An Intimate Biography

£24.95
£24.95

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A major new biography of this perennially popular artist by the world’s foremost scholar of his life and work.

The joy that permeates Auguste Renoir’s paintings was created by a complicated person, whom even close friends and family members struggled to understand. The world’s leading authority on Renoir’s life and work here presents an intimate biography of this most intriguing of Impressionist artists in a narrative interspersed with over a thousand extracts from letters by, to and about Renoir. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, Barbara Ehrlich White brings us into direct contact with Renoir as an artist, friend and father, and enables us to appreciate more fully his great paintings.

It was in the face of great obstacles that Renoir became hugely popular: thirty years of poverty followed by thirty years of progressive paralysis of his fingers. Close friendship with scores of people who helped him with money, contacts and companionship enabled him to overcome these challenges to create more than 4,000 optimistic, life-affirming paintings. The author brings a lifetime of research to bear in her biography to challenge misconceptions around Renoir’s reputation, providing an unparalleled portrait of this multi-faceted and contradictory artist through his own words and those of his friends.

Extent: 432 pp
Format: Hardback
Illustrations: 105
Publication date: 2017-10-05
Size: 24.0 x 16.5 cm
ISBN: 9780500239575
Maps • Introduction • 1. 1841–77 • 2. 1878–84 • 3. 1885–93 • 4. 1894–1900 • 5. 1901–09 • 6. 1910–15 • 7. 1915–19 • Afterword; Appendix: Selected Renoir Paintings Worldwide; Acknowledgments; Selected Bibliography

Press Reviews

The most personal account of any Impressionist ever written … an unmissable, revelatory account
Financial Times

Comprehensive … a cradle-to-grave account
Sunday Times

This new study has the blessing of the Renoir family. No one, not even Renoir himself, can ever have commanded so much information on the topic
Daily Telegraph

The leading Renoir scholar Barbara Ehrlich White has mined the artist’s voluminous correspondence to depict the man in the round
RA Magazine

About the Author

Barbara Ehrlich White is Adjunct Professor Emerita of Art History, Tufts University, Massachusetts. Her Renoir: His Life, Art and Letters (Abrams, 1984) has sold over 125,000 copies. She is also the author of Impressionism in Perspective (Prentice-Hall, 1978) and Impressionists Side by Side (Knopf, 1996). She was encouraged to write the biography of the artist by Renoir’s family, and her receipt of the prestigious French honour, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, followed recommendation by the artist’s great-granddaughter, Sophie Renoir.

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