Seated Bather

The late bather subjects occupied Renoir throughout the final decade and a half of his life, produced under conditions of severe physical hardship that add a remarkable biographical dimension to their formal celebration of bodily ease. By 1914 Renoir's rheumatoid arthritis had so deformed his hands that brushes had to be tied to his wrists; he could no longer hold them unaided. The Seated Bather at the Art Institute of Chicago, painted in this year, was produced under these conditions, yet the large, rounded volumes of the figure achieve a sculptural presence that has nothing of struggle in it. Renoir had moved to the south of France in 1903, settling permanently at Les Collettes near Cagnes-sur-Mer where the warmth eased his condition enough to allow continued work. The late bathers have been compared to Rubens's voluminous female figures — a comparison Renoir welcomed, having explicitly cited Rubens as an influence alongside Titian in his late artistic thinking. The monumental, sun-warmed physicality of these final nudes reads as a willed affirmation against the progressive destruction of his own body, the painted celebration of physical wholeness counterpointing his physical deterioration in a way that critics have found both moving and formally compelling.

Oil on canvas. Very late Renoir applies paint with a broad, sweeping motion that builds rich surface texture from overlapping strokes of warm colour. The bather's form is no longer modelled through tonal contrast but through the interaction of warm and cool colour areas — pink, ochre, and cool shadow — that create volume through chromatic rather than tonal means.