Bathers Playing with a Crab

In February 1897 the pictures that Gustave Caillebotte, a painter and a friend, had left to the French state finally went on show at the Musee du Luxembourg in Paris. Renoir was his executor and had spent three years arguing with officials who wanted to refuse most of them. Several of his own early canvases were in that room. He was working on this one at about the same time, on something quite separate from the Impressionism being fought over. After a journey to Italy in 1881, where he looked hard at Raphael in Rome and at ancient wall painting near Naples, he had set about giving his colour a firmer, more sculptural drawing, and nude bathers in a landscape were where he tested it. He came back to that subject for the rest of his life, and the Cleveland museum bought this canvas in 1939.