Seated Bather

In August 1914, as Renoir set this canvas aside on deposit with his Paris dealer, France went to war. Both of his sons enlisted, Jean and Pierre, and both came home wounded within the year. Renoir himself was 73 and had lived with rheumatoid arthritis for two decades. By now his hands were so deformed that a brush had to be wedged into his clenched fingers, wrapped in cloth so it would not cut him. From that ruined grip came this warm, unhurried nude, a seated woman drying herself in soft light, with no trace of the war or the pain in the room. He painted her at Les Collettes, his farm above Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south, where the mild climate was the one thing that eased his joints. He would die there five years later.