It is important to know art in its context. That is to say, to fully appreciate a work of art, it helps to see artworks of the same moment - to view another vision from the same time. In the case of a pair of paintings made by two different artists in the same year, in the same country, now held in the collection of the same museum, we can find divergent visions of women in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Bather Arranging Her Hair and Berthe Morisot’s The Bath were both products of the same revolutionary moment, both were painted in 1885, and both now reside not far from one another at The Clark Art Institute in Western Massachusetts. But for all they have in common, they share two opposing views of women as subject that couldn’t be more different.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bather Arranging Her Hair, 1885, Oil on canvas. The Clark Art Institute, 1955.589.
Renoir’s painting, like so much of his work, is as dully anesthetic and as psychically alleviating now as it was when it was made. An art to be a balm from the hustle and bustle. It is something pretty to look at, and with its cotton candy tonality and its imagined and idealized beauty, it gets the job done.
Renoir depicts an unknown woman, a purposefully unidentified individual, in nature. He draws on the trope of the bath in the woods that occurs so much throughout Western art that by the time he hit upon it, it would have been clichéd. Renoir’s lady looks away from us and toward an incongruous sea that itself melds with puffy clouds far away. She is dividing her ample and shiny brown hair into two parts. Her chemise falls away to reveal the curvaceous silhouette of her nude body: a breast, a belly, a buttock, a thigh. But Renoir’s is an unreal and sensualized figure. A body in space, surely, but a body nonetheless. To classify this painting as a masterclass in the Impressionist vision of landscape is to deny the fact that there’s a woman sitting in the middle of it. A woman with no identity, and no clothes.
A product of, and leader in, the Impressionist moment which would prove one of the agitating seedbeds of Modernism, Renoir is also a character whose own reputation is constantly being re-examined. Of the first generation of Impressionist painters, he is today one of the most, and perhaps most surprisingly, controversial. The #RenoirSucksatPainting movement, for instance, winkingly asks museums to “end the treacle”.
In spite of his Impressionist bona fides, Renoir’s nudes could almost be Rococco. They are unreal to the point of surreal, and sickeningly sweet. The kind of art that makes the rattle of the guillotine sound like a reasonable solution to political differences.
When looking at them and taking them at face value it is indeed often hard to tell if Renoir himself was in on the joke, or if he was making the type of paintings the market wanted, or if he genuinely believed they were any good.
Berthe Morisot (French, 1841–1895), The Bath, 1885–86. Oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 28 7/8 in. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 1955.926
In Morisot’s image of the same subject, the figure comes inside and puts her clothes on. We see a clearly bourgeois woman in a defined domestic space: France in 1885, a woman getting ready for the day. Morisot’s subject is an upwardly mobile denizen of the new middle class of the nineteenth century; both urban and urbane.
She looks out at us piercingly and unwaveringly while arranging her own hair not dissimilarly to her counterpart in Renoir’s picture. Her chemise is firmly on, however, while a brush sits in her lap and a ribbon rounds her neck. A gold bracelet and a wedding ring glitter on her delicate wrist and finger. Her clothing hides her body. She is a woman with both identity and agency. A thoroughly modern woman - at odds with Renoir’s mythological forest lady.
It is also noteworthy that Morisot’s painterly treatment of her own scene dovetails nicely with the technical elements of Renoir’s painting. These were, after all, two artists of a similar ilk, working within the same milieu. Where Renoir’s sitter is absorbed in ethereal atmosphere of light and clouds, Morisot’s is dissolved into a residential interior, with only a chair and a table to divide her from the wall. Both paintings are brashly Impressionist but their depictions of women still differ.
It is conceivable when looking at Morisot’s painting that her subject might have a life, a job, and even a purpose. She is decidedly unnymphlike and completely unsensual. She is dignified. A real woman in a real world. Renoir’s is not.
The bath as subject is an inherently voyeuristic enterprise. As the viewer of one of these paintings, we are always walking in on a woman, and typically a woman alone. We are either stumbling unwittingly, or perhaps sauntering provocatively, into a private reserve. In Renoir’s painting he allows and encourages the voyeuristic sensibilities of his audience. We become the proverbial elders to his own biblical Susanna. In Morisot’s however, the subject is aware of us and her unflinching gaze makes us aware of ourselves and of our trespass. We are seen, and the interaction is disconcerting.
Bath paintings were also often, even if subliminally, created for a male audience. Under the guise of such accepted subject matter a gentleman collector could also acquire a titillating nude. It is a kind of softcore mythology. Morisot’s painting undermines that too. Her painting defies expectations of a bath scene and could as easily be a painting for a female consumer, to whom her sitter would undoubtedly say “je suis tois”.
All of this is not to say that Renoir is somehow evil. It is not an attack on his painting(s), or, as some back door Freudian interpretation might read it, an attack on male painters more generally. To draw a comparison between these two pictures is merely to elevate our understanding of them both, and our appreciation for the societal changes occurring at breakneck speeds as the nineteenth century drew to a close.
Renoir’s nude is no doubt a product of history and of its time. But Morisot’s signals a future that she herself didn’t live to see - that of women who were not mere objects in painting, but who were makers of their own destiny. A world in which women climbed down from the pedestal in order to live in the real world. A world, for instance, in which women could vote. In Morisot’s native France, as an example, women were not enfranchised until 1944, over a century after the artist was born.
A woman in the boys club of Impressionism, Morisot was all too aware of the inequalities which faced her both within her movement and in society at large. In an incisive, telling, and heartbreaking quote from her diary, she wrote “I don’t think there has ever been a man who treated a woman as an equal, and that’s all I would have asked for – I know I am worth as much as they are.”
In The Bath Morisot turns the idea of her titular subject on its head and makes it a moment of engagement rather than of objectification. She depicts the new type of woman who populated Parisian streets as the world inched toward the turn of the century. Renoir’s Bather Arranging Her Hair, on the other hand, shows a type of female archetype who was herself already receding from art even as the paint was drying.
While Renoir’s bather looks backwards, Morisot’s looks forwards. Renoir paints an already fading history while Morisot paints a thrilling reality and a promising future. Indeed, Morisot’s bather incapsulates Modernity itself.