Sitzende Badende

Renoir went to Italy in the winter of 1881, saw Raphael's frescoes in Rome and the wall paintings from Pompeii in Naples, and came back convinced he had gone as far as he could with Impressionism. He said afterwards that he had reached the end of it and no longer knew how to paint or draw. The canvases of the next few years, this one among them, are what came out of that. The bather is drawn with a hard continuous outline and modelled almost like carved stone, while the water and leaves behind her are still handled in broken Impressionist touches, so she sits in the landscape without quite belonging to it. He called a closely related version a Naiad, a water nymph, and her pose follows a Roman statue of a crouching bather. Where her right foot meets the drapery he left the picture unresolved.