Description
A young woman sits with her back turned three-quarters to us, drying herself after a bath. Her right arm is raised, hand pressed to her red hair, while her other hand holds a white cloth striped in red against her hip; a black bracelet circles her wrist. Behind her, loose strokes of red, gold and green stand in for a garden or a screen of autumn foliage, and pale blue-white drapery pools beneath her on the seat.
Renoir painted this bather in 1888, in the warm, sculptural manner he was developing for the female nude at the time: the flesh is built from soft rose and cream with almost no hard outline, so the figure seems to hold its own light. The print keeps that softness, matching the warm skin tones against the more broken, sketch-like background so the two stay distinct.



