浴女群像

Renoir painted this in 1916 at Les Collettes, the farm above Cagnes on the Riviera where he spent his last years. It was the third year of the war and it had taken his household apart. Both his sons had been wounded at the front, and his wife Aline died in 1915, soon after travelling to the hospital where the younger one, Jean, was being treated. Renoir himself was 75 and his hands were deformed by rheumatoid arthritis. The cafés and boating parties of his early work had gone by then, replaced by nudes in a landscape that belongs to no particular year. Albert Barnes, who gathered 181 works by Renoir for his collection outside Philadelphia, picked this one as his favourite of all of them, and in a letter of 1924 called it the summation of Renoir's powers.