From Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Large Bathers (1884-1887) It now hangs on the museum’s second floor, in a gallery with the art museum’s own Cézanne Large Bathers (which he …
The painting is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia.
In the foreground, two women are seated beside the water, and a third is standing in the water near them. He made no secret of his affection for the lyric softness of Watteau or the adroit playfulness of Boucher. Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers by Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers , 1906, oil on canvas, 82-7/8 x 98-3/4″ / 210.5 x 250.8 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art) It is situated chronologically between two other works by Renoir in the Musée d'Orsay: Torso: Effect of Sunlight (1875-1876), an early work, and Bathers (1918-1919), which is characteristic of his last manner. Les Grandes Baigneuses ('The Large Bathers') is an oil-on-canvas painting by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, produced between 1884 and 1887.
The Large Bathers is admired by critics the world over for the serene quality of the painting and the contrasts between the bathers and the man swimming in the lake. Renoir painstakingly worked and reworked The Large Bathers for three years, including making several preparatory drawings and painted sketches before arriving at the finished product. Most of the subjects were women shown nude, but the interest was probably less to the bathing itself rather than to provide the context for representing the nude figure. The sixth of seven children (of whom only five survived infancy), he was recognised as a …
This Large Nude thus enables us to understand Renoir's development towards a style nourished by references to classical art. In the background, two others are bathing. The Renoir underwent an analytical deep dive and extensive restoration to repair recurrent large cracks that were bowing and damaging its paint surfaces. They represent the culmination of his lifelong investigation of this subject and the climax of his entire career, and were hugely influential on early twentieth-century art. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, The Large Bathers, 1887.
The Large Bathers The large bathers - by Pierre-Auguste Renoir Click Image to view detail. 1.2. The painting depicts a scene of nude women bathing. In Three Bathers Renoir seems almost to pay a gracious compliment to the great decorators of the French eigh-teenth century, whom he continued to admire throughout his life.
The range of his preparations seems to have impressed Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot, who wrote of her admiration for the artist’s draftsmanship, with mention of a “whole series done from the same model and with about the same movement” that she saw in his studio in 1886.
The Large Bathers was clearly a test of Renoir’s technical mastery. In the foreground, two women are seated beside the water, and a third is standing in the water near them. Detail of Renoir’s Splashing Figure (Study for “The Large Bathers”) (1884/85) showing an area where the artist rubbed away the red-chalk passage to expose the underlying layer of white chalk to create highlights.