Seated Bather and the Polemic of Renoir’s Late Nudes

Following a visit to Renoir’s Paris studio in January 1886, Berthe Morisot noted in her journal: “Two drawings of nude women going into the sea delight me as much as those of Ingres. He said that nudes seemed to him to be one of the essential forms of art.”2 Indeed, the nude would come to dominate Renoir’s work for the next three decades and define his late period style. Later in life the artist was candid about his obsession with the theme. As he told his son Jean shortly before he died: “Perhaps I have painted the same three or four pictures all my life. But one thing is certain: ever since my trip to Italy I have been concentrating on the same problems.”3

The pneumatic form of the model in Seated Bather, characteristic of Renoir’s late figure paintings, verges on the surreal. During the artist’s lifetime these late nudes, whose rhythmic contours follow no prescribed canon of beauty, provoked extreme reactions, and it is hard to believe that Renoir remained unaware of the controversy surrounding them. Mary Cassatt, who exhibited with the Impressionists, visited Renoir in Cagnes several times in 1913 and early 1914 and became alarmed by his increasing frailty and apparent isolation. In a letter to the American collector Louisine Havemeyer, Cassatt wrote scathingly: “He is doing the most awful pictures or rather studies of enormously fat red women with very small heads. Vollard persuades himself that they are fine. J[oseph] Durand-Ruel knows better.”4

If the Durand-Ruel family held any reservations about this work, it did not stop them from actively buying from Renoir. Between 1908 and 1914 they acquired nearly two hundred paintings from the artist (presumably most were recent) for a total of nearly 500,000 francs, a sum that does not include additional purchases made by collectors and other art dealers such as Ambroise Vollard.5 The deposit of Seated Bather with Durand-Ruel in August 1914, likely not long after it was painted, reflects an unabated demand for Renoir’s latest interpretation of the nude.6

The most passionate aficionados of late Renoir nudes were leading artists of the avant-garde working in Paris. In July 1919 the art dealer Paul Rosenberg wrote Renoir that Pablo Picasso desired to meet with him during a planned visit to Paris the following month, though it is assumed that Renoir’s poor health prevented this rendezvous from taking place.7 After Picasso made a trip to Italy in 1917, he entered a classical period of his own and was especially attracted to Renoir’s late bathers. Picasso’s Large Bather of 1921 (Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris) openly confesses admiration of the elder artist and seems to emulate Seated Bather in the pose and the model’s voluminous shoulders, arms, and legs. The poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire wrote glowingly of how Renoir “uses his last days to paint these fabulous, voluptuous nudes which will be admired in years to come.”8 Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard were among the many visitors the artist welcomed in Cagnes in the later years of his life, and they came to see the work, not to pay homage to an Impressionist pioneer.9 The ubiquity of the bather theme in the work of these two younger artists owes as much to Renoir’s example as to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or Paul Cézanne.

Endorsement by collectors and these luminaries of Modernism transformed late Renoir paintings in the eyes of critics. His late work came to represent a new beginning for twentieth century art, rather than a final flourishing of nineteenth century naturalism. When Seated Bather appeared in a benefit exhibition organized by Durand-Ruel, New York, in April 1942, the New York Times wrote: “Renoir’s final effort at its very best, the magnificent nude called ‘Baigneuse Assise,’ dated 1914. This is one of the greatest paintings created in our time.”10 Not all were convinced, however. A frequent visitor to the Durand-Ruel gallery in New York at the time of the exhibition, Robert Sterling Clark, grandson of the business partner of Isaac Singer, refused to add a late nude to his collection of about thirty Renoirs, most dating to before 1900. When Clark learned in June 1944 that the Art Institute of Chicago was interested in acquiring Seated Bather, he dismissed it as “a great big mushy gelatinous fat woman with a sad face strawberry tint, has no bones only fat.”11 Indeed, by the time Clark was writing, this response typified attitudes toward the late nudes.12

Renoir’s Model for Seated Bather

The model for Seated Bather is probably Madeleine Bruno, a young girl from Cagnes, who began working for Renoir in early 1914 and assisted in his care as he grew more infirm. She appears quite petite and slim in a photograph taken in the garden of Renoir’s home at Les Collettes in April or May 1914 (fig. 25.1).13 Renoir’s regular model, Gabrielle Renard, had joined the Renoir household a month before the birth of Jean Renoir in September 1894 and had been posing nude for Renoir since 1900. She left in late 1913 after quarrelling with Renoir’s wife, Aline.14 Madeleine continued to work for Renoir until at least 1916, when she posed as a standing bather of equally large scale (The Bathers, 1916; private collection [Dauberville 4281]).15 When asked about her role as a Renoir model in the 1970s, Madeleine found it difficult to recognize herself in the curvilinear forms of his figures.16

Renoir’s Classicism

Renoir’s interest in and admiration for the art of Ancient Greece is clearly articulated in the preface he prepared in 1909–10 for the reprinting of Cennino Cennini’s Renaissance treatise on painting.17 As Robert Herbert has pointed out, Renoir’s long draft for the Cennini preface, which was edited for publication in the Catholic journal L’Occident, refers continually to how the power of Greek art is derived from religion: “Conscious of their weakness, ancient peoples felt the need to shelter themselves behind divine power.”18 The year the Cennini treatise was published, the Thurneyssen family of Munich commissioned from Renoir a portrait of their son Alexander as an Arcadian shepherd (fig. 25.2 [Dauberville 4267]), completed the next year in a pose that makes explicit reference to the figure of Dionysus on the east pediment of the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens (fig. 25.3).19

The monumental gods of the Parthenon pediment may also be a source for the pose in Seated Bather, painted three years after the Thurneyssen portrait. The figure’s massive scale can be compared with the formidable proportions of the three goddesses (Hestia, Dione, and Aphrodite), who observe the birth of Athena on the east pediment (fig. 25.4). As Kenneth Clark observed of Renoir’s late nudes: “In the unselfconscious acceptance of their nudity they are perhaps more Greek than any nudes painted since the Renaissance, and come closest to attaining the antique balance between truth and ideal.” Clark reproduces Seated Bather to illustrate his point that in the early part of the twentieth century Renoir developed “a new race of women, massive, ruddy, unseductive but with the weight and unity of great sculpture.”20

While Renoir liked to think of his art as rooted in nature and not based in art theory of any kind, the exaggerated proportions of these late nudes raise the question of whether they are simply erotic fantasies or reflect a complex artistic goal in tune with the times. In particular, Renoir’s late nudes can be understood in the context of a psychology of style, part of a broader movement toward spirituality and a definition of the beautiful that lay outside accepted academic practice. In his emulation of the solid proportions of ancient Greek sculpture, Renoir sought a path to the mystical source of the southern classical tradition. Just as the artist endeavored in the 1870s to find universal truths in the popular culture of bohemian youth, in these late nudes he pursued a timeless classicism that he imagined to originate with the inhabitants of an earthly paradise at the “primitive” beginning of the Western tradition. Toward the end of his life Renoir marveled: “What admirable beings those Greeks. Their existence was so happy that they imagined that the gods, to find their paradise and to love, descended to the earth. . . . Yes, the earth was the paradise of the gods. There, that is what I wish to paint.”21

Renoir’s Late Impressionist Style and Seated Bather

The Parisian artist Albert André first visited Renoir in the south of France about 1902 and became a devoted promoter of the artist’s work and one of the most observant of his late biographers. His book on Renoir appeared about May 1919, the month he sent a copy to the artist. In it he describes the artist’s working procedures:

He launches into his canvas, when the subject is simple, by tracing with the brush, generally with reddish brown [Jean Renoir refers to burnt sienna], a few very quick guidelines to see the proportions of the elements that will constitute his painting. “Les volumes . . .”, he says a little sarcastically. Then immediately, in pure colors diluted with spirit, as if he were working in watercolor, he rapidly rubs the canvas and one sees something imprecise and iridescent appear, the tones flowing into each other, something that delights you even before it is clear how the image will appear.22

What André describes is Renoir’s habit of working quickly with a long handled, fine brush soaked in color thinned with spirits, the way one might use a crayon or pencil. Once the artist applied an initial paint layer, he ended his first session at the canvas. After the underpaint had dried a little, according to André, Renoir returned with more color and applied pure white to the areas he wanted to be luminous. The thin, transparent tones that resulted were the envy of Henri Matisse.23

Renoir executed Seated Bather in a manner consistent with André’s description of his working procedure. The paint is quite translucent overall. The flesh tones were blended while they were still in a liquid state. That resulting surface appears to exhibit endless variation in tone. Renoir explained to the American artist and critic Walter Pach his goal as a colorist in painting flesh tones: “I look at a nude; there are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver.”24 Additional white highlights in the flesh tones of Seated Bather were also added at a late stage to increase the luminosity (fig. 25.5). Renoir’s extensive use of thin layers of color throughout the painting is further exemplified in the blending of the background foliage. He dragged thin, liquid yellow and green across existing textured strokes in yellow and white; the thinner paint sank into the depressions (fig. 25.6). Areas of layered impasto are evident in the face and hair and are especially conspicuous in the application of yellow over the reddish-brown hair color (fig. 25.7).

While alluding to Greek sculpture with his principal figure in Seated Bather, Renoir placed the painting in a contemporary context by showing the model wearing tiny earrings and with her hair pulled back into a bun, as well as by adding two nudes in the background who appear engaged in typical post-bath activities: drying off with a towel and adjusting one’s hair. The rugged mountainous landscape setting is reminiscent of Provence, the region in the south of France where Renoir lived out his days. The area’s plentiful reminders of a Greco-Roman heritage cannot be underestimated as a potent source for Renoir’s updated vision of antiquity. Although the late style of Renoir is more controlled and classical in its expression of form, Seated Bather demonstrates that, in these last years, he lost nothing of the ingenious blending of color and luminosity that characterizes his earlier Impressionist painting.
John Collins