(Limoges 1841–1919 Cagnes/Nice)
Femme nue assise vue de trois-quarts (Baigneuse), 1915–19, cachet signature “Renoir” (partially faded, lower left), oil on canvas, 31 x 26 cm, framed

This work will be included in the forthcoming Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Digital Catalogue Raisonné, currently being prepared under the sponsorship of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, Inc. ,titled “Baigneuse” and dated ca. 1918

Provenance:
Sotheby’s New York, 5 November 1981, lot 182
Corazza Gandolfi Collection 1982 c. (stamp on the reverse)
European Private Collection

Literature:
A. André, M. Bernheim-Jeune (ed.), L’Atelier de Renoir, Paris 1931, vol. II,
p. 171, no. 543 with ill.
G. Patrice, M. Dauberville, Renoir. Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, pastels et aquarelles, 1911–1919, Supplément I, Paris 2014, p. 427, no. 4346 with ill.

“The nude seemed to him to be one of the most essential forms of art”
Berthe Morisot

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), one of the greatest exponents of Impressionism, always searched for the hidden bond between himself and the object that he was attempting to depict. Even though he was afflicted with severe arthritis from the age of 50, his technical mastery remained the object of great admiration until the last years of his life. His son Jean summarised his father’s illness in a few lines: “visitors who were unused to this mutilation were unable to tear their eyes from it; their reaction, and the thought they did not dare express was this: ‘It is impossible - he could not possibly paint these paintings with such hands; something mysterious is going on here!’ The mystery was Renoir himself, an enthralling mystery.”
Born in 1841 in Limoges, his family moved to Paris three years later, where his artistic career began with an apprenticeship as porcelain painter.
Renoir was admitted to the Louvre as a copyist, studied Fragonard, Boucher and Rubens – do we not detect the great Flemish painter time and again and even many years later in Renoir’s nude pictures? – and was eventually accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met Monet, Sisley and Bazille. Their friendship played a very important role in the origins of the artist’s aesthetic principles. Painting en plein air in the woodlands of Fontainebleau, his choice of subjects, and the art of capturing light effected his development into a painter of the Impressionist movement.

“The strangeness of your skin is intriguing! It completely absorbs the light. You won’t believe me, but this morning you are all grey. And the other day you were pink, oh! A pink that real light doesn’t possess! ... You drive me crazy, one never knows what to do with you.”
He stopped, and closed his eyes.
“Always breath-taking, though, the nude… makes such a mark, at the bottom… and vibrates, is animated with a terrible life force, as if one could see blood coursing through the muscles!
Ah! There is nothing better, nothing more beautiful, than a well-drawn muscle, a substantially-rendered arm, in full light, it is God incarnate!... I have no other religion, I would cement myself in position on my knees for the rest of my life!”
Emile Zola, L’Oeuvre, 1886

Renoir’s stylistic development in the depiction of nudes draws on both his early experience as an Impressionist as well as the shock he experienced in coming into contact with Pompeian murals and the works of the greatest Renaissance masters, particularly Raphael, during his travels in Italy.
Renoir’s artistic style changed radically following a total breakdown in the wake of his Italian experience: when faced with the Renaissance models, his certainties fell away, and worse still, he felt artistically ignorant, eventually convincing himself that he had never really possessed any pictorial technical ability.

“Raphael, who never painted outdoors, had, however, studied the light of the sun, because his frescos are imbued with it. By contrast, I, having looked outwards too long, have ended up unable to see the great harmonies, worrying too much over the small details which obscure the sun rather than glorifying it.”

The work presented for auction by Dorotheum on 27 November is but a demonstration of how Renoir’s devotion to his art continued to fiercely consume the artist’s heart (and hands) in the last years of his maturity.

The delicate balances which confidently define the chromatic harmonies of the small canvas render the painting an enchanting miniature of sensation still capable of capturing and restoring a secret, stolen glance even in the present day.

The attempt to balance the Impressionistic lacerating instability of visual perception, with a need to reconcile the Raphaelite model with Renoir’s own, already mature, agile, light, and fast style, whilst remaining faithful to Ingres, was a battle that would last for the rest of Renoir’s life, and would eventually result in a more robust, incisive style. In order to underpin the construction of forms, he returned to a sharp and precise style of painting, attuned to volumes, to the solidity of outlines, the monumentality of images, a progressive restraint in the use of colour, as well as in the movement towards a less episodic and more systematic synthesis of pictorial material. Moreover, he abandoned plein air painting in favour of a return to working on his creations in a studio environment, relying on his dazzling figurative reservoir. Through the same process, landscapes in his work became increasingly rare, and he developed a taste for depicting the human figure, especially female nudes. He developed a proper, stable iconography, exemplified in the absolute supremacy of the figure, now rendered with vivid, delicate brushstrokes, capable of precisely capturing the joyful mood of the subject and the opulence of its complexion.