The painter, printmaker, illustrator, and sculptor Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges in 1841 and passed away in Cannes in 1919.
Although he was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts (1862), it appears he did not attend for long. Thus, the fundamental characteristics of his painting were formed during the 1860s under the influence of Courbet and the artists working en plein air in the forest of Fontainebleau, near Paris.
The successive rejections of his works by the official state Salon led him to the Impressionist group, in which he played a leading role by painting the most striking scenes of carefree leisure. However, from the mid-1880s, he distanced himself significantly from the Impressionist style; taking Raphael and classical antiquity as his models, and focusing primarily on the nude, he returned to strong outlines and the plasticity of form. He also engaged in sculpture and printmaking. During the 1890s, he produced approximately fifty etchings and lithographs.