Lot Essay
Renoir executed many landscapes and informal outdoor scenes during the 1890's, but he devoted his more serious efforts to themes which blend modernity with timelessness, the everyday with the idyllic. In particular, he painted a long series of young female nudes in outdoor settings, both single figures and groups, whom he referred to in a letter to Gustave Geffroy as his nymphs. "The simplest subjects are eternal," Renoir wrote. "A nude woman getting out of the briny deep...whether she is called Venus or Nini, one can invent nothing better." (exh. cat., Renoir, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1985, p. 263) Renoir's series of nymphs culminated in 1897 with one of the most significant bather pictures of his entire career, Bathers in the Forest (The Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania). Both of the figures in the present work, painted just a year earlier, re-appear in the Barnes composition.
Renoir's fascination during the late 1890's with the innocent gestures and poses of young girls is well-documented. In an article published in La Revue Blanche in 1896, the magazine's co-founder Thadée Natanson described Renoir's vivid imitation of a young girl walking in the forest whose petticoat catches on a twig. (T. Natanson, "Renoir," La Revue Blanche, June 15, 1896, p. 546) In a similar vein, Geffroy characterized Renoir's bather pictures from this period as follows:
...young bodies of...bathing girls, little instinctive beings, at the same time children and women, to whom Renoir brings a convinced love and a malicious observation. They are a wholly individual idea, these young girls who are sensual without vice, oblivious
without cruelty, irresponsible though gently woken into life... They exist like children, but also like playful young animals, and
like flowers which absorb the air and the dew. (exh. cat., op.
cit., Boston, 1985, p. 264)
With their fluid brushwork and light-hearted mood, Renoir's fin-de-siècle bather scenes from the 1890's bear the unmistakeable influence of eighteenth century artists like Fragonard and Watteau. Deux baigneuses, for example, clearly recalls Fragonard's celebrated bather picture in the Louvre.
[Renoir's] espousal of the French eighteenth century...was central to his art and to the public image he projected; his essential
Frenchness became a critical cliché. Watteau and Fragonard became especially important for him in the late 1880's, as he worked his way out of the harshness of contour and rigidity of design of his
1887 Bathers. In 1888, he cited Fragonard to explain his efforts to soften and variegate his technique; his brushwork of the 1890's retains Fragonard's imprint in its increasingly rhythmic,
cursive movements which model form and create decorative pattern in the same gesture. At the same time many of his outdoor subjects
look to Fragonard...in the way in which outdoor figures and their
surroundings are woven together by composition and touch, and...made more timeless by their gestures and setting. (Ibid., p. 250)
François Daulte will include this painting in the forthcoming volume II (Figures, 1891-1905) of his Renoir catalogue raisonné.
Renoir's fascination during the late 1890's with the innocent gestures and poses of young girls is well-documented. In an article published in La Revue Blanche in 1896, the magazine's co-founder Thadée Natanson described Renoir's vivid imitation of a young girl walking in the forest whose petticoat catches on a twig. (T. Natanson, "Renoir," La Revue Blanche, June 15, 1896, p. 546) In a similar vein, Geffroy characterized Renoir's bather pictures from this period as follows:
...young bodies of...bathing girls, little instinctive beings, at the same time children and women, to whom Renoir brings a convinced love and a malicious observation. They are a wholly individual idea, these young girls who are sensual without vice, oblivious
without cruelty, irresponsible though gently woken into life... They exist like children, but also like playful young animals, and
like flowers which absorb the air and the dew. (exh. cat., op.
cit., Boston, 1985, p. 264)
With their fluid brushwork and light-hearted mood, Renoir's fin-de-siècle bather scenes from the 1890's bear the unmistakeable influence of eighteenth century artists like Fragonard and Watteau. Deux baigneuses, for example, clearly recalls Fragonard's celebrated bather picture in the Louvre.
[Renoir's] espousal of the French eighteenth century...was central to his art and to the public image he projected; his essential
Frenchness became a critical cliché. Watteau and Fragonard became especially important for him in the late 1880's, as he worked his way out of the harshness of contour and rigidity of design of his
1887 Bathers. In 1888, he cited Fragonard to explain his efforts to soften and variegate his technique; his brushwork of the 1890's retains Fragonard's imprint in its increasingly rhythmic,
cursive movements which model form and create decorative pattern in the same gesture. At the same time many of his outdoor subjects
look to Fragonard...in the way in which outdoor figures and their
surroundings are woven together by composition and touch, and...made more timeless by their gestures and setting. (Ibid., p. 250)
François Daulte will include this painting in the forthcoming volume II (Figures, 1891-1905) of his Renoir catalogue raisonné.