Titled Seated Female Nude, or Woman After Bath, this work is one of the most brilliant achievements of the female nude figures that Renoir worked on painting later in his career.
In May 1896, Renoir held a solo exhibition at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris, and later, in July of the same year, moved to Rue de La Rochefoucault in Montmartre. This work was painted that year. Three years later, in January 1899, it was acquired by Durand-Ruel, and another three years later, in June 1902, was displayed in the “Renoir” exhibition held at the Galerie Durand-Ruel in Paris: This exhibition included 40 recent works by Renoir; there is a record that this work Woman After Bath was listed as the exhibit no. 23. Subsequently, this work has been housed in the Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, after being a part of the collection of Oskar Reinhart, a world-renowned collector in Winterthur, Switzerland. In late 1898, not long after Renoir completed this painting, his rheumatism worsened to the point that he restricted movement in his right arm. Thereafter, his health was getting worse and worse, and he kept suffering from partial atrophy of his left eye muscle and repeated acute attacks of rheumatism. Even though those diseases were bothering him, his painting techniques continued to mature more and more. His female nude figures developed into the monumental depiction of human body that was without peer. This painting of a female nude wiping her foot after taking a bath has four variations that Renoir painted the woman in different poses from 1902 to 1906: One seated with her legs crossed outdoors, one wiping her left leg with a white cloth held in her right hand, and one brushing her hair with her left hand (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Detroit Institute of Arts, etc.).
The distinguishing points of this painting compared to the other paintings in this group are: the woman is sitting on cushions indoors, her body is viewed from the side, her legs are not crossed, and she is wiping her right leg. The sculptural sense of volume that can be felt in the depiction of her body could evoke the sculptures of his later years, and Renoir impressively captures the mass of her ample body. In terms of colors, her healthy skin tone that shines like singing a paean to life is perfectly blended with the white cloth and the familiar colors such as yellow, orange, green, and brown which are the attributes of Renoir’s paintings—this color palette that excludes black and limits itself exclusively to the pure colors of maximum intensity is referred to as a “rainbow palette”—to please the eyes of viewers. The matière conveys the texture like a smooth surface of porcelain rather than that of a painting: In fact, Renoir, a native of Limoges, had worked as a porcelain painter in his teens.
The reason that Renoir was fond of painting female nudes was that, for him, a female body was an ultimate form to be found amid nature’s bounty, and a means of painting was an act of admiring its physical beauty, eulogizing it, and establishing it as an eternal image. In this sense, it is impossible to define Renoir only within the framework of Impressionism. Rather, it would be essential to recognize him as the painter who belongs to the lineage of the great predecessors of painting, such as Titian and Rubens, and also as the painter who has the craftsmanship which is also common to Boucher.