Book excerpt: This volume is a biography of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. This work dedicates itself to the final three decades of Renoir's career in which the painter turned away from Impressionism and toward a more decorative approach informed by his own idiosyncratic interpretation of art history. During this period, Renoir was initially looking at painters such as Rubens, Titian and Raphael, and dedicating himself to cheery subjects such as bathers, domestic idylls and landscapes that were influenced by both classical mythology and by his relocation to the South of France.