Renoir Girl Pinning Hat

An early 20th-century master, Pierre-Auguste Renoir created thousands of figurative prints and paintings and is credited as one of the founders of the Impressionist movement. His frequently reproduced works are appreciated for their luminous appearance, rich colors and soft, feathered brushstrokes.

Renoir was born in Limoges, France, in 1841. He began painting as a child while working in a porcelain factory, which led to a formal study of art in Paris under Charles Gleyre. In the early 1860s, he often visited the Louvre to study French master painters, and he became friends with Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley, both leading Impressionists.

Renoir first exhibited his paintings in 1864, but he did not rise to prominence until his first exhibition with the Impressionists in 1874. In 1877, Renoir stopped exhibiting with the Impressionists and embarked on a series of travels. In 1881, he went to Algeria and Spain, meeting the artists Eugène Delacroix and Diego Velázquez. He continued to Rome, Sicily, Algeria and Guernsey, where he created 15 paintings in one month in the summer of 1883.

In 1890, Renoir married Aline Victorine Charigot, a portrait model and muse for many of his works. They had three sons, and in 1907, Renoir moved his family to the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, near the Mediterranean. By this time, he had developed arthritis in his hands, and he had a stroke in 1912, after which he used a wheelchair. Renoir continued to paint for the rest of his life, even strapping a brush to his paralyzed fingers.

Shortly before his death in 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings now hanging next to the artistic icons that he used to study and admire. He returned to his home village and died in December of that year.

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Emerging in 19th-century France, Impressionist art embraced loose brushwork and plein-air painting to respond to the movement of daily life. Although the pioneers of the Impressionist movement — Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir — are now household names, their work was a radical break with an art scene led and shaped by academic traditions for around two centuries. These academies had oversight of a curriculum that emphasized formal drawing, painting and sculpting techniques and historical themes.

The French Impressionists were influenced by a group of artists known as the Barbizon School, who painted what they witnessed in nature. The rejection of pieces by these artists and the later Impressionists from the salons culminated in a watershed 1874 exhibition in Paris that was staged outside of the juried systems. After a work of Monet’s was derided by a critic as an unfinished “impression,” the term was taken as a celebration of their shared interest in capturing fleeting moments as subject matter, whether the shifting weather on rural landscapes or the frenzy of an urban crowd. Rather than the exacting realism of the academic tradition, Impressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings represented how an artist saw a world in motion.

Many Impressionist painters were inspired by the perspectives in imported Japanese prints alongside these shifts in European painting — Édouard Manet drew on ukiyo-e woodblock prints and depicted Japanese design in his Portrait of Émile Zola, for example. American artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, who studied abroad, were impacted by the work of the French artists, and by the late 19th century American Impressionism had its own distinct aesthetics with painters responding to the rapid modernization of cities through quickly created works that were vivid with color and light.

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Bring energy and an array of welcome colors and textures into your space by decorating with figurative fine-art prints and works on paper.

Figurative art stands in contrast to abstract art, which is more expressive than representational. The oldest-known work of figurative art is a figurative painting — specifically, a rock painting of an animal made over 40,000 years ago in Borneo. This remnant of a remote past has long faded, but its depiction of a cattle-like creature in elegant ocher markings endures.

Since then, figurative art has evolved significantly as it continues to represent the world, including a breadth of works on paper, including printmaking. This includes woodcuts, which are a type of relief print with perennial popularity among collectors. The artist carves into a block and applies ink to the raised surface, which is then pressed onto paper. There are also planographic prints, which use metal plates, stones or other flat surfaces as their base. The artist will often draw on the surface with grease crayon and then apply ink to those markings. Lithographs are a common version of planographic prints.

Figurative art printmaking was especially popular during the height of the Pop art movement, and this kind of work can be seen in artist Andy Warhol’s extensive use of photographic silkscreen printing. Everyday objects, logos and scenes were given a unique twist, whether in the style of a comic strip or in the use of neon colors.

Explore an impressive collection of figurative art prints for sale on 1stDibs and read about how to arrange your wall art.