A Brush Tied to His Hand: Renoir's Bathers

There's an amusing twist buried in this late Renoir: the two women at the center of the canvas aren't bathing at all — they're simply lying in a field — while the three women actually in the water are tucked into a small pond in the background, off to the right. And yet the painting is titled Bathers.

Early in his career, Renoir had little interest in the female nude, but that changed in his later years, when he painted nudes obsessively and left behind a huge body of work on the subject. This canvas belongs to that later period. The two central women are rendered with full, rounded figures — a direct reflection of Renoir's own preference for curvier bodies over slender ones.

The style here also stands out from his earlier work. By the time he painted this, Renoir suffered from rheumatoid arthritis so severe that he could barely hold a brush, and he eventually had to strap one to his hand with string just to keep working. The result was a loss of delicate brushwork in favor of something closer to dabbing paint onto the canvas, leaving the backgrounds and figures' outlines soft and indistinct. As we saw with Young Girls at the Piano, there's little trace left here of classic Impressionist technique.

Renoir had been one of Impressionism's defining figures, yet he spent much of his later career restlessly pushing past it — and Bathers captures that transformation as clearly as any painting he made.