Before the Bath (Avant le bain)

This intimate female nude from 1875 is among the Barnes Foundation works that Albert Barnes systematically assembled as his collection's backbone. Barnes pursued Renoir's bather and figure paintings throughout the early twentieth century, building the largest single-institution holdings of his work anywhere. The subject — a woman preparing to bathe — draws on the long tradition of the female nude in French academic painting while removing any mythological pretext, presenting the moment in an immediate and unmediated way. Renoir's nudes of the 1870s are typically more spontaneous than his later monumental bathers, retaining the Impressionist concern with captured sensation over idealised form.

The figure is rendered with fluid, layered brushwork that suggests warmth and softness without blending to a smooth finish. Renoir uses prepared ground luminosity, laying colour thinly to allow underlying warmth to radiate outward.