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Interpretation of Renoir’s Grandes Biagneuses To speak of Renoir is to speak of color. It is true that all the Impressionists worshipped color and light. In Renoir’s work the use of color merges together like a ecstatic feast, the light takes on material qualities, it foams and sparkles in his pictures. The colors illuminate the surroundings like precious stones illuminate a piece of undisturbed earth. Renoir used brilliant colors in his early works but seems not to have reached full maturity in his paintings till later, in which color becomes luminescent. Renoir’s early background seems to lead us to the foundation of his craftsmanship. Renoir had to start work at the age of ten to help financially support his family. He worked in a Paris workshop, porcelain painting for which probably gave him a sure eye for the selection and combination of colors. The powerful range of colors and the collective appearance of these colors are greatly rendered in Renoir’s Grandes Biagneuses (Women Bathing). The painting was started in 1883 and completed in 1895. The painting is a rich forty-five inches by twenty-eight inches on a canvas backing. The foreground is highly dominated by the soft cream skins of three women figures. While the background is taken up sharply by the rich purples, greens, browns, and yellows. Revealing a lingering river, supportive trees, and other assorted fauna. The paintings main focal point is of a nude woman sunbathing along side a riverbank, with all motion starting there. The woman is shedding a bathing blanket and exposing her self to the viewer in a very tender manner. The woman is probably nineteen years of age with still a touch of a baby face. Her soft, slightly fleshy body stands faced before the viewer tilted to a minor angle. The woman is elevated slightly and her burgundy hair color, which is lighter then the rest of the figures, pronounces her (for reference figure two). She has perfect cream skin that has rarely danced with the sun. The figure is slightly more fleshier then the other women. Yet she is the beauty of the picture. Her movements are less dramatic then the figure below her to the left actions.
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