• Language Select
• English
• Japanese

Collection

	"Girl beside a Fountain" (1887) Pierre-Auguste RENOIR (1841-1919) Date ca. 1887 Materials/ Techniques oil on canvas Size 41 x 32.5 cm

"Girl beside a Fountain" is a oil painting by the Impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, when he was 46 years old. Renoir displayed his paintings at the first Exhibition of Impressionist in 1874, 23 years before painting this piece. He was already in touch with other Impressionist painters, such as Claude Monet and ?douard Manet at this time. Renoir at his age 30, he presented his well-known Impressionist paintings one after another, [The Swing] and [Dance at le moulin de la Galette] for instance.
It was from the early 1880 when Renoir started to doubt about the painting method of Impressionist. He pursued his own way of painting based on the classism style of the Renaissance. Then in 1883, he gained fame at an exhibition of his pictures at the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris, and he achieved good reputation at the exhibition in the United States in 1886.
At this time, Renoir vigorously kept on drawing women and the naked women as a series of paintings on "maternity." In 1887, he completed the series of paintings of naked women known as the "Large Bathers." This representative series is currently in the Louvre Museum. "Girl beside a Fountain", painted soon after the completion of the "Large Bathers" series, was a piece of the most productive period of his life among other 2000 pieces of women's images, after the completion of the "Large Bathers" series. Renoir told us as follows: "The part of the images I like is the skin, the pink skin of young women, in smooth blood circulation. It is healthiness, that pleases me the most."
Renoir never stopped pursuing his ideal expressions of female's skin, they are perfectly apparent in this piece "Girl beside a Fountain."