Large Bather

In the autumn of 1905 the Salon d'Automne in Paris opened a room of young painters whose colour was so raw that one critic called them wild beasts, and the name Fauves stuck to them. Renoir was the honorary president of that Salon, and this is what he was painting: a single bather, broad and warm, closer to the nudes of Titian and Rubens than to anything hanging in that room. He was 64, and rheumatoid arthritis had been stiffening his hands for years, which is why he spent his winters at Cagnes-sur-Mer on the Riviera, where the warmth helped. Two years after this canvas he bought an old olive farm there, Les Collettes, and stayed there for the rest of his life.