Blonde Bather

Renoir painted the first version of this figure in 1881, during a winter in Italy that pulled him away from the Impressionists. He had gone to see Raphael in Rome and the ancient wall paintings taken out of Pompeii, and years later he would say that around then he had reached the end of Impressionism and found he knew neither how to paint nor how to draw. The model was Aline Charigot, who later became his wife, and the background, by his own account, is the Bay of Naples. That first canvas is in Williamstown in Massachusetts, at the Clark. This is the second one, made in 1882 for his dealer Durand-Ruel, who had seen the first and wanted another. It differs from the first in size and in the colouring of the background. It hangs in Turin, on the roof of the old Fiat factory at Lingotto.