Study for The Great Bathers

This work is a preparatory drawing for The Great Bathers (1884-87, Philadelphia Museum of Art), one of the most ambitious and labor-intensive paintings Renoir produced. In the early 1880s, Renoir became dissatisfied with the approach of his fellow Impressionist artists both to creating paintings and to exhibiting and marketing their work in independent exhibitions. In the same period, he first visited Italy and was struck by the techniques of the fresco paintings he saw in Pompeii and Rome. As a result, he began to seek greater rigor and structure in his own work, often emulating the sharp outlines and dry surface of fresco, and turned increasingly to drawing to develop his compositions. After initially producing a full-scale drawing and an oil sketch of the Great Bathers composition with three figures, probably in the fall of 1886, Renoir then focused on just the left-hand and central bathers. The Morgan's drawing is likely the first of two large studies in red and white chalk, in which he has drawn a more robust figure in the center than that in the initial sketch and tested different placements of her left arm, showing it either at her side or bent at the elbow and partially raised. In fact, the area of white chalk above this figure's shoulder, which Renoir seems to have added sometime in 1908, also covers traces of her arm reaching upward for a tree branch, as in his initial sketch. For the final painting the artist changed this figure's pose yet again, showing her drying herself with a towel.