He was born in Limoges, the fourth child of a tailor, and at thirteen he was apprenticed to a porcelain factory in Paris where he painted flowers and figures onto dinner plates. The work was delicate, decorative, meant to please -- and Pierre-Auguste Renoir would spend the rest of his life defending the belief, unfashionable even among his friends, that art should please. "Why shouldn't art be pretty?" he once asked. "There are enough unpleasant things in the world."

He met Monet and Sisley in a studio in Paris, and in the summer of 1869 he and Monet set up their easels side by side at La Grenouillere, a swimming spot on the Seine, and painted the same scene in small, quick dabs of color that caught the shimmer of water and the flutter of sunlight through leaves. It was the laboratory of Impressionism. Two young painters with no money, inventing a new way of seeing because they could not afford to finish anything slowly.

Renoir's paintings of that era -- Luncheon of the Boating Party, Bal du moulin de la Galette -- are among the great records of ordinary human happiness. Young people in straw hats eating fruit and drinking wine. Dancers spinning in dappled light under the trees of Montmartre. Skin flushed with warmth. Laughter mid-sentence. He believed, almost religiously, that the act of painting should be a form of pleasure, and that the pleasure should pass into the canvas and from there into the viewer, and from the viewer out into the world.

In his forties he grew dissatisfied and broke from the Impressionists, traveling to Italy to study Raphael and Titian. His style tightened, then loosened again. The women he painted grew rounder, more monumental, bathed in rose-gold light. Some critics thought he had lost his way. He did not care. He was following the line wherever it led him.

Rheumatoid arthritis began to cripple him in his fifties. By the end of his life his hands were so twisted that a brush had to be wedged between his fingers and bound in place with a cloth. He could barely walk. And yet he painted on, almost daily, for twenty more years, producing hundreds of canvases of bathers and flowers and his own family from a wheelchair in the garden of his house in Cagnes-sur-Mer. When a young visitor asked him how he could bear the pain, he smiled and said, "The pain passes, but the beauty remains."

He died in 1919, the day after completing a small still life of anemones. His last recorded words were, "I think I am beginning to understand something about it."