A Bather

Renoir's Bather of 1887, now at the National Gallery in London, belongs to the period immediately following his prolonged engagement with the classical bather subject that produced the monumental Grandes Baigneuses (1884-87). After years of precise, hard-contoured drawing influenced by study of Raphael, Ingres, and ancient sculpture — what critics called his 'harsh' manner — Renoir was beginning to relax toward the warmer, more fluid handling of his late style. The single bather isolated against a simple background was a format he returned to repeatedly in these years, stripping away landscape and narrative to concentrate on the relationship between the figure and the painted surface.

Oil on canvas. The 1887 Renoir occupies a transitional moment between his dry-manner precision and his later feathery impasto. Skin is modelled with careful tonal gradation, but the edges are softer than the Grandes Baigneuses period, and the background begins to lose the hard-edged definition of the preceding years.