Jean Renoir (1894-1979), the son of the painter Auguste Renoir, was born in Paris, grew up in the south of France, and served as a cavalryman and pilot during World War I. He directed his first film,
La Fille de l'eau, in 1925 and followed it with many others, including his masterpieces
Grand Illusion (1937) and
The Rules of the Game (1939). In 1975 Jean Renoir received an Academy Award for his lifetime contribution to the cinema.
Robert L. Herbert, after a long career at Yale, is now Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Mount Holyoke. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and has been named Officier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government. Among his books are
Impressionism: Art, Leisure and Parisian Society, Nature's Workshop: Renoir's Writings on the Decorative Arts, and
Seurat: Drawings and Paintings. His most recent book is
Seurat and the Making of La Grande Jatte. Randolph Weaver translated several books from French into English. With Dorothy Weaver, he translated
Renoir, My Father by Jean Renoir.
Dorothy Weaver and Randolph Weaver translated Jean Renoir's
Renoir, My Father, a memoir about his father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir.