Composition, Five Bathers (Composition, cinq baigneuses)

Renoir painted this in the last year of the First World War, at Les Collettes, the olive farm above Cagnes on the Mediterranean where he spent his final decade. He was 77 and his hands were so deformed by rheumatoid arthritis that a brush had to be put between his fingers for him. Both his elder sons had been wounded at the front, Pierre in 1914 and Jean in 1915, and his wife Aline died in June of that second year, her health broken after the journeys to reach them. None of that is in the picture. Five nudes sit in a warm landscape with no date and no place attached to it, which is very nearly all he painted after 1910. He died in December 1919.