Renoir is perhaps the best-loved of all the Impressionistsfor his cheerful subject matter - pretty children, flowers, graceful women. In his early works, he embodied the French Impressionist ideals of depicting outdoor scenes with sparkling color and light.

Pierre Auguste Renoirbegan his career as a painter in a porcelain factory. In 1862, he entered the studio of Gleyre and formed lasting friendships with other Impressionists, including Monetand Sisley. He endured much hardship early in his career but achieved success as a portraitist in the late 1870's.

After visiting Italy in 1881 - 82, Renoir developed a softer, more supple style which is evident in his pictues of young girls in softly colored settings.

Renoir's later works, particularly his formal figure paintings of ample women, show a more disciplined approach and a break from contemporary themes to more timeless subjects.

Unlike many impressionists who focused on landscapes, he painted not only landscapes, but people in intimate and candid compositions—sometimes applying paint with a palette knife rather than a brush. Characteristic of impressionism style, Renoir painted not the details of a scene, but instead his figures softly fuse with one another and the surroundings. In his paintings from the late 1880s, the figures and scenery look more distinct from one another, but the paintings of his final years again display the softness.

His initial paintings show the influence of the artistry of Eugène Delacroix, and of his friend Claude Monet with whom he developed the impressionist style. The influence of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and Camille Corot is also seen in his work.

In the late 1860s, obsessed with painting light and water, he and Monet discovered that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them.

One of the best known impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (Le Bal au Moulin de la Galette), which depicts an open-air scene, jammed with people, of a popular dance garden on the Butte Montmartre close to where he lived.

A prolific painter, he made several thousand paintings.

The warm sensuality of Renoir's style made his paintings some of the most well known and frequently reproduced works in the history of art.