About this item
During the seventy-eight years of his life, Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted thousands of paintings and made uncounted drawings, watercolors, and sketches. Behind this prodigious output, rivaling even Picasso’s, is a lifetime of struggle and anguish seldom hinted at in the work of this “happy painter.” His efforts to find a new art to match his vision of the world created by light and warmth are vividly and intimately chronicled here through his letters and those of his friends and patrons. Barbara Ehrlich White, a renowned Renoir scholar, devoted more than twenty years to searching out unpublished letters and documents that reveal his life as an artist and as a man. First published in 1984, her book was praised for its comprehensive yet intimate history of Renoir's life and work.
About the Author
Barbara Ehrlich White, Ph.D., lectured on art history at Tufts University from 1965-2002. Currently, she is Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Art History at Tufts University. She wrote Renoir: His Life, Art, and Letters, published in 1984, which is still in print and has sold 125,000 copies. It is in 1,285 libraries in 18 countries and the New York Times chose it as one of the two best art books of 1984. White is the author of Knopf's Impressionists Side By Side: Their Friendships, Rivalries, and Artistic Exchanges, and numerous journal articles. She also edited Prentice-Hall's Impressionism in Perspective in 1978. Her 2017 Renoir: An Intimate Biography is based on her collection of 3,000 letters by, to, and about Renoir; the biography quotes 1,100 letters of which 452 are unpublished. In the course of her career, she won many grants and awards. In 2014, the French Minister of Culture and Communication awarded her Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of Art and Literature) . She lectures about Renoir and Impressionism. In 1973 she was Associate Producer and Script Writer of an educational television documentary on Renoir for public television which won an Emmy for Outstanding Program Achievement.
