Renoir’s ‘Baigneuse’ comes from one of the artist’s most highly regarded series - bathers. This group of works is exemplified by his famed large scale paintings of multiple female bathers in Musee d’Orsay, Paris and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Before the 1880s Renoir rarely painted the nude, but following a trip to Italy in 1881 where he examined paintings from the Renaissance, sculptures from Roman antiquity and frescos at Pompeii, the nude became a staple of his oeuvre, with the classical imagery of the bather at its centre.

In ‘Baigneuse’ Renoir has depicted the woman with red chalk, a medium so recognisable as by his hand. He applies the chalk with multiple sweeping lines, overlaying each other to create a sense of movement in the arms and torso. The body is highly detailed with gentle blending of the chalk to create depth, in contrast to the few minimal lines that so perfectly capture the fabric at her waist in swift strokes.

At the time Renoir created ‘Baigneuse’ he produced a number of bather paintings which are now in such museums as The National Gallery (‘A Bather’, c. 1885-90) and Barnes Foundation (‘Bather’, 1895). ‘Baigneuse’ adopts the same compositional trope of only depicting the upper half of the body as in the Barnes Foundation painting.

‘Baigneuse’ was first owned by the famed Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard who alongside Renoir also championed the work of Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne.