Bather Drying her Right Leg

Renoir painted this at Cagnes, on the Riviera, around 1910, as one of a run of nudes that grew out of a canvas from the year before, known as The Wounded Bather. The young woman takes up almost the whole picture. Renoir liked a figure to fill the canvas nearly to bursting, as he put it to his friend, the painter Albert André. Her pose, bent over a raised leg with a towel, has been linked by the Italian scholar Ettore Camesasca to a famous ancient bronze in Rome's Capitoline Museums, a boy pulling a thorn from his foot. The skin is built from a narrow range of pinks and whites, and Renoir scraped some of his shadows back so the pale ground shows through where the light falls. The canvas reached São Paulo in 1952, paid for by a group of donors that included the city's Jockey Club.