Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Paul Durand-Ruel, Paris (acquired from the artist on January 21, 1898)

Thence by descent

Denis Rouart, Renoir, Geneva, 1954, illustrated in color p. 80

The canvas is lined. Under ultra-violet light, the most minimal retouchings appear on the extreme edges, a small spot on the girl's hair and two tiny spots in the lower right corner. Otherwise, this work is in very good condition.
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In the 1880s and 1890s, Renoir devoted himself to the creation of an idealized art undisturbed by modernity.  The female nude had always figured in his work, but came to prominence from the mid-1880s onwards, when Renoir sought to introduce Arcadian themes and classical precision into his art.  Inspired by the works of Raphael which he saw during his visit to Italy in 1881-82, Renoir began to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women.  This is sometimes called his 'Ingres period,' and the realism in the nudes from around this time also suggests that his return to this theme was also inspired by the French academic tradition.

Baigneuse is a superb example of Renoir's mature style, exemplifying his ability to capture the feminine form with his fluid, loose brushwork.  His unusual painting technique builds up a shimmering paint surface that gives his late nudes their distinctive quality.  This style allowed Renoir to showcase an astonishing mastery of a broad range of painterly effects.  John House has noted that he was able to "combine breadth with extreme delicacy of effect [....]. At times he painted very thinly and with much medium over a white priming, particularly in his backgrounds, allowing the tone and texture of the canvas to show through, and creating effects almost like watercolour.  His figures tend to be more thickly painted, but not with single layers of opaque colour; instead fine streaks of varied hue are built up, which create a varied, almost vibrating surface" (J. House in Renoir (exhibition catalogue), The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985, p. 278).

Julius Meier-Graefe has referred to Renoir as, "a son of Delacroix and a grandson of Rubens" and by the time this work was painted the artist's references tended towards Titian and Rubens rather than to Ingres.  The nude came to play such an important part in Renoir's late work because it enabled him to unite responsiveness to the physical presence of his models whilst demonstrating an awareness of historical continuity.  As John House noted, "[the] nudes of the 1890s are on the borderline between modernity and timelessness" (House, ibid., p. 264).  It was these late monumental nudes that for many comprise Renoir's greatest artistic achievement and provided an important source of inspiration for Picasso's neo-classical oils of the same subject (fig. 3).