Artwork · 19th century · Auguste Renoir

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Young Girl Bathing

Auguste Renoir1892Oil on canvas81.3 × 64.8 cm

At a glance

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A girl with long red-gold hair sits on a white cloth at the edge of tall grass, eyes lowered, resting quietly.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted her in 1892, when he was about fifty.
Her skin is painted soft and melting, while the grass and cloth are slashed in with quick strokes. Two kinds of brushwork share one canvas.

Reading the picture

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Zoom in on her face. She is seen in profile, head bowed, eyes almost shut. Pink warms her cheek and the tip of her ear, and her lips are a short touch of orange. There is hardly an outline, so her face melts gently into the green behind her.
Look at the hair spilling over her shoulder. Strokes of brown, orange, and gold curl like water. Some strands are just a single dark brown line, flicked on and left alone. The hair seems to lie right on top of her pale skin.
Zoom in on the grass along the left edge. Long strokes of green and blue-green shoot upward and become reeds. Where the paint is thin you can see the weave of the canvas showing through. With only a few strokes, a whole clump of grass seems to sway.
Now the white cloth at the lower right. Renoir laid on thick white, gray, and pale pink, then dragged the paint to make creases. At the edge he pulled the brush down in short flicks, so the cloth seems to drip like a fringe. Up close it is just paint. Step back and it turns into damp linen.
Look in the lower left corner. In brown paint you can read Renoir and 92. That is his signature and the year, 1892. He wrote it right over the green, so you have to get close to find it.

When it was painted

In 1892 Renoir was fifty-one. As a boy of thirteen he had painted decorations on porcelain in a Paris workshop. Now he was a well-known painter. Two years earlier he had married his longtime companion, Aline Charigot, and their son Pierre was seven.

Good news piled up that year. In May the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel gave him a solo show at his Paris gallery. Around the same time the French government asked him for a painting for the Musée du Luxembourg, the museum for work by living artists.

Renoir chose two girls at a piano, and he painted the scene several times. The state bought one version, which now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The painter once turned away by the Salon and mocked by critics was now in a national museum.

Another version of the piano girls belonged, like this Young Girl Bathing, to the banker Robert Lehman. Both pictures came to the Metropolitan Museum in 1975 with his collection.

In the 1880s Renoir had tried a harder, outlined style for a while before returning to soft brushwork. Bathers became a subject he kept painting for the rest of his life. In old age rheumatoid arthritis stiffened his hands, but he went on painting.

Look again at the white cloth beside the girl. In the same year he painted his piano girls over and over, Renoir could still set down a sheet of linen with a few thick, quick strokes.

The painter

Auguste Renoir

1841–1919

When painting this, the artist was about 51 years old

All paintings by Auguste Renoir →

More by the same painter

Madame Georges Charpentier (Marguerite-Louise Lemonnier, 1848–1904) and Her Children, Georgette-Berthe (1872–1945) and Paul-Emile-Charles (1875–1895)1878

Two Sisters (On the Terrace)1881

By the Seashore1883

Questions to think about

Look for itWhere in this painting is the white paint laid on most thickly?
Why?Why do you think Renoir painted the girl's body smoothly but the grass and cloth with rough strokes?
What about you?The title does not give this girl's name. When we post a photo of someone today, how much should their name and their permission matter?

Same period