Après le bain

Renoir told his dealer Ambroise Vollard years afterwards that around 1883 a sort of break happened in his work. He had gone to the end of Impressionism, he said, and had reached the point where he knew neither how to paint nor how to draw. He had spent the winter of 1881 in Italy, looking hard at Raphael in Rome and at the wall paintings dug out of Pompeii, and came back wanting clear contour and solid form, which most of his Impressionist colleagues thought a dead end. This small bather belongs to the beginning of that turn. The picture travelled to Scandinavia in 1914 for exhibitions in Copenhagen and in Kristiania, as Oslo was then called, and the war broke out while it was there. It stayed in the Norwegian national collection, still the property of a French dealer, until the shipowner Tryggve Sagen bought it and gave it to the museum in 1917.