Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Estate of the artist
Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London
Private Collection, United Kingdom (acquired from the above in 1976)
Thence by descent to present owner

Paris, Paul Rosenberg and Company, 1932, no. 32
Montreal, W Scott and Son, Exhibition of Paintings by French Masters of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, 1937, no. 48
London, Marlborough Gallery, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1951, no. 43

Bernheim Jeune, ed., L'Atelier de Renoir, Paris, 1931, vol II, no. 550, illustrated pl. 174
Guy-Patrice & Michel Dauberville, Renoir. Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels, dessins et aquarelles, 1911-1919, Paris, 2014, vol. V, no. 4289, illustrated p. 394

The canvas is not lined and UV examination reveals a minor 1cm-long line of retouching on the rib cage of the leftmost bather. There are a few fly spots and very fine lines of craquelure in places. There is a tiny spot of paint loss to the green pigment in the upper left tree. This work is in overall very good condition.
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s lavish scenes of frolicking bathers are some of the most celebrated compositions of his mature career, and Étude de baigneuses is a beautiful and intimate example of this theme. More than any other avant-garde painter of the late nineteenth century, aside from perhaps Degas, Renoir focused his energy on the subject of the female nude, and the results he achieved were both unique and striking. The development of Renoir's style in depicting his nudes draws from both his early experience as an Impressionist painter and the influence of a trip he took to Italy in 1881, when he went to see works by Raphael and other Renaissance masters. Renoir's approach to this subject underwent a series of transformations in the 1870s and 1880s, resulting in some of his most iconic and best-loved works. The present work is a superlative example of this important theme.

John House writes the following on Renoir's fascination with the subject of the female nude in outdoor settings: ‘On his travels Renoir painted many landscapes and informal outdoor subjects, but his more serious efforts were reserved for themes which tread the borderline between everyday life and idyll-themes with obvious echoes of eighteenth century art. He painted a long series of nudes, mainly young girls in outdoor settings, whom in a letter he called his 'nymphs.'  Mainly single figures at first, he brought them together in groups around 1897 in several pictures of girls playing which translate the subject of the 1887 Bathers into a fluent informality very reminiscent of Fragonard's Bathers (Musée du Louvre, Paris)’ (John House in: Renoir (exhibition catalogue),The Hayward Gallery, London, 1985, pp. 250-51).