His Dream Was To See His Work On Display At The Louvre

Leonard Renoir, a tailor by trade, and his wife Marguerite Merlet raised Pierre Auguste Renoir in an impoverished family. Due to financial troubles, he had to drop out of school in 1854 and start working as a porcelain painter at Lévy Frères. When porcelain ornamentation became industrialized in 1858, he lost his job. He made money for the following few years by, among other things, painting images on window blinds.

He was allowed permission to produce replicas of artwork in the Louvre, France's premier museum, when he was eighteen years old. He resumed studying art a year later, and his contribution to the annual state-sponsored Paris Salon was accepted in 1864. He had attained financial success by the 1880s and was a world-renowned artist by the turn of the century. Renoir visited the Louvre shortly before his death in 1919 to have his paintings displayed alongside those of the old masters he copied and revered.