Bather

The 1887 Bather at the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, Japan belongs to the year of Renoir's most ambitious figure work — the same year as the Large Bathers in Philadelphia, which took three years to complete and represented his programmatic response to his formal crisis. The bather subjects of 1887 show him moving beyond the harsh, controlled manner of the deepest Ingresque phase toward the more fluid synthesis of his mature late style. By this point he had found a way to maintain structural volume and definition — the lessons of Raphael and Ingres absorbed and digested — while restoring the warmth of colour and looseness of touch that had been his natural manner in the 1870s. The Pola Museum, which holds one of Japan's finest collections of European Impressionism, assembled this work as part of the extraordinary Japanese enthusiasm for Renoir that developed in the twentieth century: his celebration of sensuous beauty and his warm, accessible palette made him among the most widely collected Impressionists in Japan, where his work entered private and public collections in numbers matched only by his popularity in American collections.

Renoir's bather is modeled with his characteristic broken, pearlescent brushwork — flesh conveyed through warm and cool passages that capture the effect of outdoor light on skin. The handling is looser than his 'dry' period but retains greater structural awareness than his purely Impressionist nudes. His palette in these works favors warm pinks and creams against cooler greens and blues of the natural setting.