 Hi everybody, welcome to Barnes to Take Out. I'm Martha Lucy, Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation and Education at the Barnes, and today we are going to focus on a painting by Pierrot-Goustre Renoir called Bathing Group, and it was painted in 1918. And here it is in Gallery 8 on the first floor of the Barnes Foundation, and it's hanging here above a chest of drawers and in between two saizons, and you can see that Barnes installs this in a really sort of tight kind of interesting way where he's got a triangle of Renoir's integrated with a triangle of saizons here. But let's zoom in on this painting, Bathing Group. So when most people think about Renoir, I think they think about Renoir the Impressionist. His Impressionist period works are the ones for which he is best known, and that period spans generally like the 1870s. This is a late period Renoir, so again it was done in 1918, 40 years after the Impressionist period. So he was going strong 40 years later, and he had this whole other kind of chapter of his career that we don't talk about as much. But it's actually this chapter of his career, especially the last 10 years of his life that Barnes was so interested in. Barnes has 181 works by Renoir in his collection, and about 85% of those are late period Renoir's. And so when we say late period that generally means like late 1890s up until 1919, which is the year that Renoir died. So again, this is painted in 1918. So one year before Renoir died, he was about 78 or 79 years old when he painted this. At this point in his life, he was in a wheelchair. He suffered very badly from rheumatoid arthritis. Maybe you've seen photographs of him, but his hands, he didn't really have the use of his hands. So they were kind of almost kind of curled up on themselves. And he had to hold the paintbrush in between his fingers, and he would have assistants help him with this. When he painted this work, he was living in the south of France. He had moved permanently to the south of France in 1908. He bought a big estate in Caen-sur-Mer, which is not far from Nice, near the Mediterranean. And he lives there until his death in 1919 with his wife and family. And his subject matter really changes when he moves there. He goes from painting a lot of scenes of the city kind of urban life to focusing on scenes like this, scenes of where you're not with no kind of real hint of modernity, these kind of timeless scenes that take place in nature. He becomes obsessed with painting the female nude. He paints hundreds and hundreds of works depicting the female nude, and Barnes collected a lot of them. So he would have painted these figures outdoors. He would have had the model pose outdoors. He loved to look at the way that a model skin captured light. He talked all the time about flesh and skin and light and tactility. And so these models would have been posing outside. You can see that the light hits them and they almost look as if they're glowing from the inside. And his way of painting at this point was very interesting. He paints using very thin paint that, you know, where the paint is kind of very liquid and sometimes kind of drips down the canvas. And he would build up the paint in layers. You can see here how, see how those little nubs, that's actually the canvas weave coming through. That's how thin the paint layers are. And those nubby little kind of white peaks help to create this appearance of flesh that is kind of tactile because he's obsessed with the sense of touch at this point, but also that looks like it's kind of illuminated. So after painting, you know, doing individual paintings of these bodies, he puts them all together in this composition. And it's a strange composition. I mean, this is not a scene that is meant to, he's not trying to convince you that what you're looking at here is something that you would actually come across in nature. I mean, these bodies don't behave really the way that bodies behave. I mean, what I'm talking about is, you know, this gesture. What is she meant to be doing? This arm looks very kind of artificial, like it's boneless, this kind of J-shaped arm. And he's doing this intentionally. I mean, he is embracing artifice. He's embracing the decorative. At the same time, he is making sure that there is a really strong relationship between the human body and nature in this painting. So look at the way that with all of the bodies, the vegetation kind of follows the contours of the body here and here. It really just kind of echoes her shape. And over here, you know, this log almost looks like it could be an extension of this figure's arm. And also the way that flesh tones, you know, these kind of these kind of pinkish flesh tones are dragged through the landscape. He is really trying to emphasize the relationship between the body and especially the female body and nature. And, you know, possibly he is, and probably he is saying, he is saying something here unconsciously probably about women's role in the natural sphere. I mean, Renoir said all sorts of things about how women should stick to, you know, shouldn't think too hard, should just sort of accept their biological destiny. And so it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that the relationship between the female body and nature that he is so beautifully kind of articulating here is some sort of statement. Of course, we don't know for sure. I think that also these, the rhyming that happens between nature and between the body is simply a formal device is another way that Renoir holds this picture together, a way that he kind of creates unity between all the different areas of the composition. But I think that if we think more broadly about the relationship between the body and nature here, the fact that these figures sort of seem so comfortable, so kind of integrated with the landscape, we need to think about it in terms of the period when Renoir is painting this and his feelings about what's going on in the world. And I'm talking about industrialization, I'm talking about technology, the rise of modernity that had really kind of overtaken Paris, where he had spent most of his career. He complained all the time about technology and how people were, you know, forgetting how to sort of live simply. And so I think that part of his obsession with painting bodies in nature like this, I think it's part of his yearning for a kind of pre-modern sort of utopian time when humans were really connected with nature. That's it for today. I hope that you enjoyed Barn's Takeout. Please tune in again soon. Thank you.