Renoir’s Bathers (Study for The Great Bathers): A Recent Acquisition at the Morgan Library and Museum

This essay focuses on the Morgan Library and Museum’s recently acquired drawing Bathers (1886–87), made in preparation for Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s painting The Great Bathers (1885–87; Philadelphia Museum of Art). It is the first in-depth study of the drawing and also reexamines the artist’s process in developing and refining his celebrated painting. Considering the visual and written sources of Renoir’s creative processes as well as the artist’s intellectual concerns during the mid-1880s, I discuss Bathers together with Renoir’s other large-scale preparatory figure drawings, which adopted similar graphic techniques. I hope not only to clarify the chronology of Renoir’s production of The Great Bathers but also to offer a fresh appraisal of the role drawing played in Renoir’s working practice in the decade following his emergence as one of the leading figures in the Impressionist movement.