Bather and Maid (La Toilette de la baigneuse)

Renoir made this around 1900, when he was nearly 60 and had long left behind the dances and boating parties of his Impressionist years. What drew him now was the oldest subject in European painting: a woman at her bath, helped by a maid. He gives her the warm, full, reddish flesh of his late manner, closer to the Titian and Rubens he studied in the Louvre than to the fleeting Paris scenes that had made his name. These were also the years when arthritis was beginning to stiffen his hands, though little of that strain shows in the ease of the brushwork. The canvas later crossed the Atlantic to Merion, Pennsylvania, where the chemist Albert Barnes gathered one of the largest collections of Renoir anywhere.