The Bathers

The Bathers: Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir Oil Painting - The Bathers

Keywords: Bathers

Work Overview: The Bathers
Artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Year 1918–1919
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 60 cm × 110 cm (24 in × 43 in)
Location Musée d'Orsay, Paris

The Bathers (French: Les Baigneuses) is an oil painting on canvas made between 1918 and 1919 by the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. After being given to the State by his three sons in 1923, it is currently kept at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.

There are two groups of naked women: two models lying in the foreground plus three bathers in the background, on the right. One of the models of this painting is Andrée Hessling, who became the first wife of Renoir's son, Jean. The natural setting displayed in the painting was the large garden of the house owned by the painter in Cagnes-sur-Mer.[1]

In the painting, Renoir removed any reference to the contemporary world and showed "a timeless nature". The theme of the bather is predominant in the final season of Renoir's paintings: the women portrayed by the painter are free and uninhibited. These bathers are "melted in the nature and the forms merge with the trees, flowers and the shares of red water".[2]

The painting received criticism because of "the enormousness of the legs and arms, the weakness of flesh, and the pinkish color of the models".

This painting is emblematic of the experimentation carried out by Renoir at the end of his life. After 1910, he returned to one of his favourite subjects – nudes on the open air – and produced several large paintings. In them, Renoir celebrated a timeless view of nature from which all reference to the contemporary world was banned. The Bathers may also be regarded as Renoir's pictorial testament, for he died in December 1919. It was in this spirit that his three sons, among them the filmmaker John Renoir, gave the painting to the State in 1923.

The two models lying in the foreground and the three bathers sporting in the stream in the background posed in the large garden full of olive trees at Les Collettes, the painter's property at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the South of France. The Mediterranean landscape refers to the classical tradition of Italy and Greece, when "the earth was the paradise of the gods". "That is what I want to paint," added Renoir. This idyllic vision is emphasised by the models' sensuality, the rich colours and full forms.

The Bathers owes a great deal to the nudes painted by Titian and Rubens, so greatly admired by Renoir. They express a pleasure in painting which was not dampened by the illness and suffering that the painter endured in his last years.

After three years of experimentation, The Bathers, which I considered my masterwork, was finished. I sent it to an exhibition - and what a trouncing I got! This time, everybody, Huysmans in the forefront, agreed that I was really sunk; some even said I was irresponsible. And God knows how I labored over it!"

The abuse that greets any new direction in art seems bizarre in retrospect; and though Renoir had often been attacked, he could hardly have expected derision for this masterpiece of his periode aigre. It represents an amazing summation of everything he had done and learned. Here are the color and luminosity of a great Impressionist; drawing that results from his admiration of Ingres and Raphael; the benefits of his researches into the clarity and simplicity of fresco painting; the playful grace of his adored eighteenth-century French predecessors; and, above all, that sweet ingenuousness that can exalt a bit of fun into something of Olympian grandeur.

The charms of the picture are not confined to the ladies alone: few painters in the history of art could succeed like Renoir in matching the natural allurements of subject with the allurements provided by his own taste and style. The refined, melodic drawing-a violin-clarity of line - is one of the great achievements of art. It is especially important in this picture to savor the decorative silhouettes and spaces Renoir has so brilliantly invented: the arabesque made by the contours of rocks and feet is an example. The intricacy of shape and line-play is daringly counterpointed against the uncomplicated, cameo-smooth appearance of the figures themselves. Renoir here uses flat, unshadowed lighting, which ordinarily subdues modeling; and yet, through delicate tints, he produces a luscious roundness in the bodies.

The spirited poses derived in part from the seventeenth-century bas-reliefs of Girardon, at Versailles; the piquant faces, the vivacious gestures, the robust elegance are Renoir's. Cooks, housemaids, gamins, shopgirls-Renoir paints them, and the world understands how it was that the gods of ancient times coveted mortal women.

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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