Young Woman Bathing

The pose is far older than the painting. A nude standing in water, one hand raised to her breast and the other lowered, is how ancient sculptors showed Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, and the Pola Museum of Art in Hakone, which owns this canvas, reads the figure against that tradition. Renoir painted it in 1888, in the years when he was deliberately looking back to classical art after a long run of modern Paris scenes, dance halls and boating parties. He kept the goddess's gesture and left out anything that would name her, so what remains is a young woman bathing. The water fills the entire background, with no bank or sky anywhere, and the museum points out how he built its shimmer from short horizontal strokes of yellow, red and white laid across the canvas.