 Hi everybody and welcome to Barns Takeout. My name is Martha Lucy. I'm Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation and Education at the Barns. And today we are going to talk about this painting by Pierre Auguste Renoir. It's called Bader and Maid or the Toilette de la Benus, which means the toilet of the Bader. And it was done around 1900. And before we get into it, I want to show you a picture of the painting on the wall at the barns. This is in room two. And you can see how big it is. It's surrounded by works by Cézanne and Van Gogh. And this is much bigger. It's the size that you would see in the annual salon in Paris. Much more sort of academic size. So this painting comes relatively late in Renoir's career. He died in 1919 and he painted all the way up to the end, but this was done in 1900. So he still had a lot of work in front of him. But this is also a good 20 years after his impressionist period when he was showing with Monet during the 1870s and 80s. And while you can see that he still has kind of retained some of that impressionist, the sort of loose brushwork, especially if you look in the background, see how it's kind of feathery brushwork back here. But overall, the painting has a solidity to it and a kind of tightness and a sort of design to it that we don't typically associate with the impressionist that is much more associated with academic painting or the sort of official painting of the time. The figures are incredibly sort of balanced and stable. The composition is stable. The main figure, this bather, is perfectly centered and the attendant is behind her. And together they form this kind of pyramid shape that takes up most of the composition. There is a sort of a counteraction between the two that also, I think, reinforces the stability of the painting. The way that she leans a little bit this way and then this figure leans a little bit the other way. You know, there's just this harmony between them that creates this overall stability. Every element of the painting has something that sort of rhymes with it that makes the whole painting work together as a whole. Even things like this, you know, this tree up here, this structure is kind of counterbalanced with this still life down here, which we're going to look at in a moment. The use of color, the way that the red up here is then counterbalanced with the red down here. The shapes, you know, there are all these rhyming shapes that are repeated throughout that kind of make the whole thing hold together. So I think this is a really dominant shape up here, this Y created by the tree. But then look how you see this Y shape repeated. Or I guess I should say this V shape repeated in the neck line, in the arms of the bather, you know, down here. It's just, it really makes the whole thing hold together. The way that this figure is framed by the hair coming out on both sides. And also just look at the way that they, that the figures that Renoir emphasizes tactility in this painting, the sort of physicality of the body in space. The body in space here is not some visual phenomenon, which it would have been in an Impressionist exhibition. It would have been sort of like something that you glimpse, that kind of light shimmers off of the way that it would, you know, a boat or water. But here he's really emphasizing the kind of materiality of the body and making it into a solid form with his use, his kind of sculptural use of light. And emphasizing the sense of touch, even by the way that the figures themselves are engaged in the act of touch, all four hands are holding something. And look at the way that these hands, when you look at them together, they kind of form this pyramid. So all of this is to say that it's a very tightly designed composition. And critics at the time noted this, celebrated the painting for this quality. So even the subject here is, has a kind of academic feel to it. It looks like it could be, you know, Venus bathing in the woods. We know that it's not a Venus, it's actually supposed to be, it's meant to be a modern French woman. He gives us little clues about this in the still life down here in the foreground. You see a hat, zoom in on this. And you can also see this corset here, which was, you know, a sign, very much a sign of contemporary fashion at the time. But what's interesting is that when you think about this compared to other toilet scenes or scenes of women bathing and getting ready and, you know, powdering and dressing. And these were a very popular subject at the time that Renoir was painting, all of the avant-garde that everybody was doing toilet scenes. But usually they take place indoors, I'm thinking of Toulouse-Lautrec, I'm thinking of Surat, thinking of Dugas. They usually take place indoors and there's much more of an emphasis on artifice and sort of the making up of the body and the transformation of the body into something that's kind of artificial. And Renoir, I feel like he is sort of saying, yes, this is a toilet scene, but we are going to emphasize the naturalness of and celebrate the naturalness of the female body. He did not like corsets. He thought that they were corrupt. He much preferred the natural body over the artificial one. And so I read this with the corset kind of cast off to the side as Renoir kind of ranking nature above artifice. I think that it's a celebration of the female body in nature. And of course it's an idealized female body very much in that academic tradition. Now Barnes bought this in 1935. And when he bought this, the painting was sort of having a moment in the press because it had been traveling around and going to a lot of different exhibitions. And it was singled out by critics as being one of Renoir's best works. And Barnes got it when it was shown at the Binyu Gallery in 1935 and to great fanfare, the press reported on it. But what's interesting I think is that earlier that year Barnes had published his book called The Art of Renoir. So before he bought this painting and he talks about this painting in the book and calls it banal and academic. He celebrates certain aspects of it. He says it's his great design but it feels like a very much like an academic painting. So it's interesting that he then buys it a couple of months later. And then in later editions of The Art of Renoir he never retracts what he says about it. So it could be that maybe he changed his mind. Maybe once he saw it again in New York he decided that this really is a great painting and I need it for my collection. But it also could be that he did really feel that the painting had some faults and that he wanted to include it. And he said at different points that he wanted to be able in his collection to show the best work of an artist but also an artist's failings. And so because this was a teaching collection maybe he felt that it was sort of beneficial to have something that he felt wasn't perfect. Well I hope that you have enjoyed today's takeout and please tune in again next week. Thanks.