Nude women play at the edge of a stream: one standing in the water is about to splash a friend, who leans back to dodge it. Renoir spent three years and more than twenty studies on the picture after a trip to Italy turned him towards Raphael and Ingres. He traced the main figures from drawings and gave them crisp, sculptural outlines.
Look closer
Compare the halves: the hard-edged bathers at left, traced from drawings, against the loosely brushed swimmers and landscape at right, painted in his earlier Impressionist manner.
Looks like this
Compared by a vision model
