Bather with Loose Blond Hair

In 1923 Austria was a small new republic, its currency only just steadied after runaway inflation, and that year the state gallery in Vienna made a trade. Ten years earlier it had bought Édouard Manet's large early picture The Old Musician. Now it let the Manet go to Paris in exchange for two other paintings, and one of them was this bather by Renoir, which came through the Paris gallery Barbazanges. The Manet ended up in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Renoir had painted this canvas around 1903, when he was in his early sixties. The model sits on a white sheet, pushing her long loose hair back with one hand, and a straw hat trimmed with red flowers lies beside her.