Born in 1841 in Limoges, the porcelain capital of central France, Pierre-Auguste Renoir moved to Paris as a young boy, growing up in close proximity to the Louvre. At the age of thirteen, he became an apprentice at a porcelain manufactory, displaying remarkable skill in painting Rococo-style bouquets. When industrial mechanization cost him his position, he supported himself by decorating fans and window blinds while continuing to teach himself drawing. Granted official permission to copy artworks at the Louvre at nineteen, he immersed himself in the works of Boucher, Fragonard, and Rubens. The following year, he entered the studio of Charles Gleyre, where he met Claude Monet and other kindred spirits.

In 1869, Renoir and Monet worked en plein air at La Grenouillère, a floating resort on the Seine, jointly developing a technique of capturing water reflections through short, broken brushstrokes. While Monet focused on atmospheric shifts caused by shifting light, Renoir closely observed the costumes, expressions, and modern leisure of the crowd. He applied Impressionist optical theory directly to the human form rather than pure landscape, endeavoring to recreate the dappled shadows cast by sunlight without using black or brown, relying instead on juxtaposed bright hues. In his Torso: Sun Effect (Study), exhibited at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876, he rendered the dappled shadows filtering through leaves onto a woman's nude back with flecks of blue, violet, and green, prompting critics to denounce the figure as resembling decomposing flesh.

In the late 1870s, he found commercial success as a portraitist for wealthy Parisian patrons, but a journey to Italy in 1881 precipitated a radical transformation in his art. Confronted with the murals of Pompeii and the classical draughtsmanship of Raphael, he recognized severe technical limitations in the Impressionist dissolution of form within light. Declaring that he had "wrung Impressionism dry and arrived at a dead end," he turned sharply toward crisp outlines, three-dimensional volume, and a cooler, more restrained palette of smooth surfaces. The Large Bathers, which took three years to complete, deliberately abandoned ephemeral outdoor light effects in favor of rigorously sculpted contours developed in the studio. This unexpected departure bewildered patrons who had come to expect his characteristically luminous, tender warmth.

Entering the 1890s, Renoir retreated from this rigid, Ingresque style, transitioning into his "Pearly Period," which wedded the solidity of classical form with the vibrant color of Impressionism. In 1892, a major retrospective at Paul Durand-Ruel's gallery achieved commercial success, and the French state made its first official acquisition of his work for public collections, purchasing Two Young Girls at the Piano. Yet even as his financial security was firmly established, the first debilitating symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis began to afflict his limbs. Seeking a milder climate as his pain worsened, he purchased land in Cagnes-sur-Mer in the South of France in 1907, establishing his final home.

As rheumatoid contractures advanced, Renoir lost the ability to walk by 1913 and was confined to a wheelchair. Having entirely lost grip strength, his hands were tightly wrapped in white gauze to prevent sores, and family members or assistants slid the brush into the crook between his thumb and forefinger. Even as his physical mobility became severely curtailed, his palette grew increasingly saturated with fiery reds, warm oranges, and radiant golds. In his late masterwork, The Bathers, completed in 1919, the contours once again dissolved into the background, merging voluptuous nude figures with Mediterranean sunlight. After witnessing the installation of one of his works in the Louvre, he passed away on December 3 of that year at the age of seventy-eight. His monumental, sculptural red-toned nudes were later acquired by Pablo Picasso, serving as a profound source of inspiration that ushered in Picasso's own Neoclassical period.