Pierre-Auguste Renoir – Young Girl Bathing

Young Girl Bathing – a background you can see the bare canvas through in places

Young Girl Bathing is an oil painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, made in 1892. The original measures 64.8 cm x 81.3 cm, is recorded under inventory number 1975.1.199 and is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Our canvas wall art Young Girl Bathing is painted by hand in oils, in eight upright sizes from 65 x 80 to 140 x 170 cm.

A mesh of strokes instead of a landscape

The young nude sits in profile on the bank, her hands clasped over one knee and her head bent forward. Long red-gold hair falls across her shoulder and back. A white cloth is laid over her lap, and folded linen lies to her right. The background is a mesh of blue, green and brown strokes suggesting the scrub along the water.

Why hand-painted, not a print

Our version is not a print. The background here is not a flat field but a mesh of separate strokes in blue, green and brown, with the canvas left visible between them in places; the body is set into it by a soft passage from warm flesh to cool green. A hand-made version keeps both of those – the gap between the strokes and the softness of the passage – which print fuses into one even surface.

In the room

The scene takes a lighter room and more free wall around it than most of Renoir’s bathers: a living room, a work corner, a bright hallway, or the wall facing a window. The blue, green and brown of the background cool the warm flesh tones, so the work needs no warm wall to carry it – it stands well against grey, pale blue or white as well. Because the canvas stays visible between the strokes in places, a larger format opens the whole mesh out and the scene gains air, while a small one draws it together into a single surface. For a smaller wall we recommend 80 x 100 cm, for a larger one 130 x 160 cm, and for a wide living-room wall 140 x 170 cm.

What you receive

We paint the canvas to order, by hand and for you alone, so every copy is made on its own; the canvas is usually painted and dried within three to four weeks. If you prefer, we will paint it in a size that is not on the list. Before despatch we send you a photograph of the finished canvas for your approval, and only then does the painting go out. Young Girl Bathing arrives stretched on a wooden frame and ready to hang, wrapped in protective film and in rigid packaging, with no further stretching or finishing needed.

• Subject: young nude seated in profile on the bank with a white cloth and folded linen, Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• Technique: hand-painted oil painting on canvas, stretched on a wooden frame
• Sizes: 8 sizes, from 65 x 80 cm to 140 x 170 cm, another size on request
• Detail worth knowing: the scene is cooler and more open than most of Renoir’s bathers, and between the strokes of the background the canvas is left uncovered in places

See also:

• Long-haired Bather
• After the Bath
• Bather with a Griffon Dog