The Large Bathers

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The Large Bathers: Pierre-Auguste Renoir

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

Keywords: Bathers

Work Overview: The Large Bathers
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Alternative name: Les Grandes Baigneuses (Renoir)
Date: 1887
Style: Impressionism
Period: Rejection of Impressionism
Genre: nude painting (nu)
Media: oil, canvas
Dimensions: 115.6 x 170 cm
Location: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, US

Les Grandes Baigneuses, or The Large Bathers, is a painting by Auguste Renoir made between 1884 and 1887. The painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia.[1][2]

The painting depicts a scene of nude women bathing. In the foreground, two women are seated beside the water, and a third is standing in the water near them. In the background, two others are bathing. The one standing in the water in the foreground appears to be about to splash one of the women seated on the shore with water. That woman leans back to avoid the expected splash of water.

The figures have a sculptural quality, while the landscape behind them shimmers with impressionistic light. With this new style, Renoir's intention was to reconcile the modern forms of painting with the painting traditions of the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly those of Ingres and Raphael. Renoir also admired Rubens and Titian's works, and he tried to find a compromise between the styles of these old masters and the new impressionist style.

It is inspired at least in part by a sculpture by François Girardon, The Bath of the Nymphs (1672), a low lead relief realized for a fountain park of Versailles. It also reflects the influence of the works of Ingres, and particularly the frescoes of Raphael, whose style he had absorbed during his trip to Italy. These two great artists influenced Renoir's entire way of painting and drawing: he began to paint in a more disciplined and more conventional manner, gave up painting outdoors, and made the female nude – until then only an occasional subject– his main focus.

Renoir worked on The Bathers for three years until he was content with its composition. During that time, he made numerous studies and sketches, including at least two full-sized figure drawings of the theme.[3]

The Bathers may also be regarded as Renoir's pictorial testament. The models for the three bathers included two of his favorites: Aline Charigot, the blonde sitting behind, whom Renoir married in 1890, and Suzanne Valadon, herself a painter and the mother of Maurice Utrillo.[4]

After completing The Large Bathers, Renoir received severe criticism because of his new style. Tired and disillusioned, he never again created paintings of this caliber.[5][6][7] A similar subject later appeared in a series of paintings by Paul Cezanne.

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Although this painting depicts a fleeting moment when one bather playfully threatens to splash a companion, it has a timeless, monumental quality. The sculptural rendering of the figures against a shimmering landscape and the careful application of dry paint reflect the tradition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French painting. Renoir--in an attempt to reconcile this tradition with modern painting--labored over this work for three years, making numerous preparatory drawings for individual figures and at least two full-scale, multifigure drawings. Faced with criticism of his new style after completing The Large Bathers, an exhausted Renoir never again devoted such painstaking effort to a single work.

In the 1880s Pierre-Auguste Renoir sought to move his art beyond Impressionism and to forge a link between modern art and the classical tradition of French painting, represented for him by such great painters and sculptors of the past as Jean Goujon, François Girardon, and Nicolas Poussin. The result was this large-scale composition of nude bathers, which occupied much of his attention for some three years and was preceded by numerous preparatory studies. Using as his source a bas-relief by the seventeenth-century sculptor Girardon in the garden of Versailles, he executed a perfectly still, carefully composed grouping of monumental figures. Although the theme of nude bathers would stay with Renoir throughout his career, some of his Impressionist colleagues thought that with this work he had betrayed the cause of modernist painting by retreating to classicism. Christopher Riopelle, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 200.

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Renoir's change of direction between 1884 and 1887 was dictated by an individual approach. The spontaneity of Impressionism, as well as its traditional fondness for landscape, gave way to a gradual elaboration of composition that enabled Renoir to reexamine the problem of the nude in a landscape. For his Large Bathers, Renoir did a number of preliminary designs. Having been a Delacroix admirer in his early years, Renoir here seems to turn toward Ingres, and the way he neatly outlines his shapes places him in the context of the nude that in the 1890s was to preoccupy such artists as Félix Valloton and Charles Maurin.

Faced with criticism of his new style after completing The Large Bathers, an exhausted Renoir never again devoted such painstaking effort to a single work.

This work is featured in the online catalogue Renoir Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, the second volume in the Art Institute’s scholarly digital series on the Impressionist circle. The catalogue offers in-depth curatorial and technical entries on 25 artworks by Pierre-Auguste Renoir in the museum’s collection; entries feature interactive and layered high-resolution imaging, previously unpublished technical photographs, archival materials, and documentation relating to each artwork.

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