Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (25 February 1841 – 3 December 1919) was a French artist. He was a leading painter who helped to create the Impressionist style. He painted portraits, and still life, but above all, he painted social scenes of the day.
As a painter of women, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau".
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to him being chosen to paint designs on fine china. He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school. During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.
In the late 1860s, through the practice of painting light and water "en plein air" (in the open air), he and his friend Claude Monet discovered that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them, an effect today known as diffuse reflection. Several pairs of paintings exist in which Renoir and Monet, working side-by-side, depicted the same scenes ("La Grenouillère", 1869).
Renoir experienced his initial acclaim when six of his paintings hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874. In the same year, two of his works were shown with Paul Durand-Ruel in London.
One of the best known Impressionist works is Renoir's 1876 Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette ("Bal du moulin de la Galette"). The painting depicts an open-air scene, crowded with people, at a popular dance garden on the "Butte Montmartre", close to where he lived.
The works of his early maturity were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling colour and light.
A trip to Italy in 1881, when he saw works by Raphael and other Renaissance masters, that convinced him that he was on the wrong path. For the next several years he painted in a more severe, classical, style. After 1890, however, he changed direction again, returning to thinly brushed colour to dissolve outlines as in his earlier work. From this period onward he concentrated on nudes and domestic scenes.
A prolific artist, he made several thousand paintings. The warm sensuality of Renoir's style made his paintings some of the most well-known and reproduced works in the history of art. The single largest collection of his works—181 paintings in all—is at the Barnes Foundation, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In 1890, he married Aline Victorine Charigot. She, with a number of the artist's friends, had been a model for "Le Déjeuner des canotiers" (Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1881). They already had a child, Pierre, in 1885. After his marriage, Renoir painted many scenes of his wife and daily family life, including their children and their nurse, Aline's cousin. The Renoirs had three sons, one of whom, Jean, became a film director of note and another, Pierre, became a stage and film actor.
Around 1892, Renoir developed rheumatoid arthritis. In 1907, he moved to the warmer climate of "Les Collettes," a farm at Cagnes-sur-Mer, close to the Mediterranean coast. Renoir painted during the last twenty years of his life, even when arthritis severely limited his movement, and he was wheelchair-bound. He developed progressive deformities in his hands and ankylosis of his right shoulder, requiring him to adapt his painting technique. It has often been reported that in the advanced stages of his arthritis, he painted by having a brush strapped to his paralyzed fingers, but this is erroneous; Renoir remained able to grasp a brush, although he required an assistant to place it in his hand. The wrapping of his hands with bandages, apparent in late photographs of the artist, served to prevent skin irritation.
During this period, he created sculptures by cooperating with a young artist, Richard Guino, who worked the clay. Renoir also used a moving canvas, or picture roll, to help him paint large works.
In 1919, Renoir visited the Louvre to see his paintings hanging with the old masters. He died in the village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, on 3 December.
Antoine Watteau
Jean-Antoine Watteau (10 October 1684 – 18 July 1721) was a French painter. His brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens. It brought back the almost forgotten Baroque idiom, which, in time became known as Rococo. He invented the genre of "fêtes galantes": scenes of bucolic and idyllic charm, with an air of theatricality. Some of his best known subjects were drawn from the world of Italian comedy and ballet.
Soggy biscuit
Soggy biscuit (also called limp biscuit, crispy cookie, ookie cookie, or jizzcuit) is a masturbation game played mostly by teenage groups in which the participants stand around a biscuit masturbating until ejaculating onto it; the last person to do so must eat the biscuit. The term is thought to have originated in Australia sometime in the 1960s.
Although the way its spelled may differ slightly, the notability of the game is shown by the variations on the being referred to in popular culture, examples including Stephen Fry's "The Liar", the German movie "Crazy", the 2006 film Sleeping Dogs Lie, the "Chains" episode of Blackadder II, the "Freaks & Greeks" episode of Drawn Together (2004-2006), the "Sleepover" episode of Big Mouth, Limp Bizkit, and Skinless's song "Scum Cookie".
Hurricane Isabel
Hurricane Isabel was the costliest and deadliest hurricane in the 2003 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the ninth named storm, fifth hurricane, and second major hurricane of the season. Isabel formed from a tropical wave in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. It moved northwestward, and it steadily strengthened to reach peak winds of 165 mph (265 km/h) on September 11. After weakening and strengthening for four days, Isabel slowly weakened. It moved onto the Outer Banks of North Carolina with winds of 105 mph (165 km/h) on September 18. It quickly weakened over land.
In North Carolina, the storm surge from Isabel washed away part of Hatteras Island. This area of washed away land was sometimes known as Isabel Inlet. Damage was highest along the Outer Banks, where thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed. The worst effects happened in Virginia, especially in the Hampton Roads area and on the shores of the James River. Virginia had the most deaths and damage from the hurricane. About 64% of the total damage and 68% of the total deaths from the storm happened in North Carolina and Virginia.
There was moderate to severe damage up the Atlantic coastline and as far west as West Virginia. About six million lost power in the eastern United States. Rain fell from South Carolina to Maine, and westward to Michigan. In total, damage is estimated at $3.6 billion (2003 USD, $4.1 billion 2008 USD). 16 deaths in seven states are blamed directly on the hurricane. 35 more deaths in six states and one province were not directly related to the hurricane.
Eugène Delacroix
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.