Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who painted in the impressionist style. Renoir's paintings show vibrant light and color, and harmony of lines. Unlike many impressionists who focused on landscapes, he painted not only landscapes, but people in intimate and candid compositions—sometimes applying paint with a palette knife rather than a brush. Characteristic of impressionism style, Renoir painted not the details of a scene, but instead his figures softly fuse with one another and the surroundings. His initial paintings show the influence of the artistry of Eugène Delacroix, and of his friend Claude Monet with whom he developed the impressionist style. The influence of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and Camille Corot is also seen in his work. In the late 1860s, obsessed with painting light and water, he and Monet discovered that the color of shadows is not brown or black, but the reflected color of the objects surrounding them. In his paintings from the late 1880s, the fi