PASTEL STUDY by PIERRE-AUGUSTE RENOIR

Introduction to the discovery

Signed Renoir Discovery
Pastel Study for the Bathers
21 3/4" x 27 3/4"

Renoir is known and unknown. We celebrate his love of pure articulate, fine light which defines his very best known works. Did his bathers spring to life as spontaneously as the religious actions of Van Gogh or were they the result of many well executed experimental studies, like a Da Vinci, Tiepolo, or Watteau? An examination of the history of the famous painting the Great Bathers by Renoir, for example, will prove the latter of the two.

Renoir struggled with himself, until they pleased the needs of his viewers. Renoir's son said... 'My father would copy the same motif three or four times, but each time would be special and different.' Sketches in pastel and charcoal pre-empted paintings. Beautiful images were destroyed or placed on a back burner simply because he could not be praised immediately; pictures were stolen (Vollard); some were given to friends.

Great Renoirs were the result of unseen works, some as important to us now as the celebrated picture. Historically these unseen pieces have only temporally lost their place.

The clues in the chemical contents of paper and pigments send us back to Renoir. Renoir's newly discovered Bathers pastels on paper turns out to be drawn on the one roll of paper Renoir used, which was given to the artist by his brother, for whom Renoir worked. The painter used this highly unusual paper for the bathers

Pushkin Museum Aline Renoir 1881-1882

studies and other large drawings. Pigment testing discovered that In 1880 Renoir chose to use older pigments for some of the pastel pigments, rather than the new colors of 1880 for the Bather study. This pastel painting shows the model Aline Charigot, who is the center of Renoir's world, posing in the studio like two happy Venus's in opposing positions. Renoir wrote an introduction for a book about Renaissance painting in 1883 at the time of the pastel. The study is a sensitive, delicate, inspiring, painted without stop or go showing his grander as Renoirdiscovery.com will prove.