About Renoir Wall Art
The Impressionist who kept painting people
While the others chased weather and water, Renoir kept coming back to the human face. Dancers at Montmartre, a girl with a watering can, friends around a lunch table on a river terrace: he spent fifty years proving that a person in dappled sunlight is as hard, and as worth painting, as any cathedral facade.
Browse the collectionRenoir Wall Art exists for a single purpose; to bring the paintings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir into everyday life as genuine, hand-painted oils.
Why Renoir
Renoir painted people. Where others of his circle turned to rivers and cathedral fronts, he stayed with the human presence; a crowded dance floor in Montmartre, a lunch that has run long on a terrace above the Seine, a girl holding a watering can in a garden. His subject was ordinary happiness, painted with an unusual warmth of colour and a light that falls in patches through leaves.
He began as a decorator of porcelain in a Paris workshop, painting flowers onto plates before he ever stood at an easel. That training in a fluent, unhesitating hand never left him. In his last years, working from the south of France with hands crippled by arthritis, he was still painting.
Because Renoir died in 1919, his paintings are in the public domain, free for everyone to enjoy and to own in reproduction.
Museum-sourced works
Every image in our collection is based on a documented Renoir held in a public collection, from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Phillips Collection, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Courtauld in London. We keep to the facts of each painting; its subject, its year, and the museum that holds it. Where a detail is not documented, we say nothing rather than invent it.
How your painting is made
Each hand-painted oil is painted to order by a studio artist, in oils on canvas, at the size you choose. It is a real painting with real brushwork and texture, not a print; no two are identical, and neither is the original. For those who want the image at a lighter price, we also offer canvas prints, reproduced photographically onto canvas.
You are buying a reproduction of a painting held in a museum. You are never buying the original, and we will never suggest otherwise.
Follow the life
The Met essay on Auguste Renoir follows him from the porcelain workshop in Limoges to the last canvases painted with a brush strapped to his hand; the catalogue below follows the same route, work by work.
See the movement
The Met essay on Impressionism places his work alongside fellow Impressionists and explains what the group was actually arguing about.
Shop by warmth
Portraits, dancers, gardens and river afternoons each carry a different temperature of light into a room.