La bagnante bionda

Renoir painted this during a trip to Italy in the autumn of 1881, and the journey changed him. He was 40 and successful, but standing before Raphael's frescoes in Rome and the ancient wall paintings near Naples, he decided his Impressionist manner had grown too loose, too dissolved. He wanted solid, sculpted flesh again. The bather's smooth, rounded modelling is that new ambition trying itself out. The hazy blue behind her is the bay of Naples, by his own account. The model was almost certainly Aline Charigot, then his companion and later his wife, who had travelled with him and would sit for him for years.