The Bathers

Renoir painted this around 1903 to 1905 at Cagnes, on the Mediterranean coast, where he spent his winters for his health. What happened to the canvas afterwards is the stranger story. It sat in the Paris stock of Ambroise Vollard, the dealer who had handled Renoir for decades, until Vollard was killed in a car crash in July 1939. The inventory of his estate lists it flatly as a Renoir, a bath, four figures. In November 1941, with Paris under German occupation, the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne bought it. It spent the rest of the war in storage at Tübingen, passed through the Allied collecting point at Baden-Baden as number 1103, and came back to France, where the state assigned it to the Louvre's paintings department in 1951. The label still reads MNR 878, which means the state holds it in trust and the ownership question from those years was never closed. Since 1995 it has hung at Les Collettes in Cagnes, the property Renoir bought in 1907 and lived in until he died.