A framed painting by Pierre Auguste Renoir entitled "The Cafe".

Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841 to 1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. The works of his early maturity were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling color and light. By the mid 1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined formal technique to portraits and figure paintings. After 1890 he changed direction again. To dissolve outlines, as in his earlier work, he returned to thinly brushed color . A prolific artist, he created several thousand paintings. The warm sensuality of his style made his paintings some of the most well known and frequently reproduced works in the history of art.