Description
A nude woman bends forward from the waist, dark hair pinned loosely at the back of her head, drying her leg with a white cloth gathered in both hands. Her weight settles into one hip, the pose turning her torso slightly toward the viewer while her gaze drops down toward her own hands and leg.
She stands not against any drape or fabric but directly in front of a screen of green foliage, grass and leaves rendered in short, broken strokes of yellow-green, olive and darker green, with the pale trunk of a young tree visible at the left. There’s no drapery, no studio prop, just the woman and the plants around her.
Her skin is painted smooth and pearly, built from warm pinks, ivories and soft golds with almost no harsh line separating one plane from the next, a deliberate contrast to the choppy, dabbed brushwork of the greenery behind her. A small gold ring on her hand is one of the few sharply defined details in the whole canvas.
The bather at her toilette, drying herself after bathing outdoors, is a subject Renoir returned to again and again in these years, and this version leans toward the sculptural: solid, rounded forms built with soft gradations of light rather than the flatter patterning of his earlier figure paintings.
At room scale the warm, glowing body reads as the clear focal point against the cooler green ground, an easy anchor for a wall, while the smooth modeling of the flesh holds its softness even viewed up close, in contrast to the rougher, more energetic brushwork surrounding it.
