PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR (1841 — 1919) The Bathers. Around 1918–1919, panel, oil, 116 cm wide.
“The Bathers” is Renoir’s last work, his final masterpiece. It sums up his difficult artistic searches. Renoir painted this picture in Le Collet — a small estate on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, which he bought at the end of his life when he became rich and famous. The colors, hot as if saturated with heat and warmth, not only reproduce the atmosphere of the south, a summer day filled with light, warmth, and sweet languor. In the barely feverish, excited energy of the brushstrokes, the splendor of the painterly “dough” transformed into luxurious forms of thick and bright vegetation, and the naked bodies of the bathers, one feels the old artist’s delight in the sensual beauty of nature. Here he remains faithful to the principles of plein air painting, the direct reflection of the colorful richness of the visible world. And at the same time, as one of the creators of Impressionism, in this painting Renoir consciously uses the experience of his great “classical” predecessors — Rubens, the Venetians