Renoir: An Intimate Biography

The joy that permeates Auguste Renoir's paintings was created by a complicated person, whom even close friends and family members struggled to understand. 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.

This volume offers 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 Drawing on a wealth of unpublished material, Renoir's personality is studied as an artist, friend and father, and enables us to better appreciate his work.