We present an essential work of art hidden for a hundred years, a masterpiece found in an antique show by a fine art photographer employed by essential collectors, art dealers, and artists in New York City for thirty years. The discovery was hidden by pastel dust on the inside of the framing glass and a film of grime on the front of the framing glass.

The Pastel Study for the Philadelphia Museum Grand Bathers painting is a critical color study created by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, born in Limoges in southwest France. He began work as a unique painter on porcelain, then moved to Paris, joining the studio of the successful fine art painter Charles Gleyre from 1861 to 1862. Renoir was known as a revolutionary experimental genius twenty years into his solo Paris career, creating elegant significant works that sold to American and Russian collectors but resisted in France.

The 1883 unique and solitary complete Pastel Study for the Grand Bathers is the only full-colored, thoroughly detailed study for any painting made by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is the single-inspired color pastel study with two complete figures of his wife, Aline Charigot, posing as happy Venuses nude, on his French special grain paper invented in 1879, called guillotage paper, as per John Rewald states in his book Renoir Drawings.

The porcelain-like pastel is a modello for the final two foreground classical figures of the six water nymphs on an Impressionist background of the first Grand Bathers Painting. These nudes follow some of the rules of Italian Renaissance art. His love of classical sculpture influenced the work

The figures in the black-and-white preparatory studies for the Grand Bathers appear incomplete. The final painting's concepts in the Pastel Study, with the two front figures having complete fingernails, hair, and ears, were necessary for Renoir’s process. The spontaneous Pastel Study in eight colors has all the completions of the two front models of the final Grand Bathers painting with identical torsos and front right raised leg.

All international scientific pigment and paper tests, while discovering the ingredients and age of Renoir’s paper he used for the Grand Bathers, conclude the work is substantial and 100% authentic.

We are examining all the scientific, intuitive, and historical visuals with information on Renoir’s processes, system, and related artistic style. This Pastel Study is essential in the evolution of his most remarkable work, his first Grand Bathers, in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In the middle of his life, Renoir rejected Impressionism. He wanted a diametrically opposite style as part of a new direction as an experimentalist eager to immerse in new paths for making art. Renoir traveled to Italy with Aline Charigot from 1882 to 1883. While in Italy, he studied and repaired the frescos in churches.

Raphael’s frescoes in Pompei were his favorites and influenced him most in life-generating inspirations for his genre and staged depictions executed subsequently in France. Under Raphael and Italian bas-relief influence, he moved forward with elements of the Rococo style. Frescoes emerged as an inspiration for the lines of the body in a new style seen in his famous later nudes. He traced and used optics to project studies with a lantern projector to create oversized studies and masterpieces. Implementing scientific testing, we discovered Renoir used lithopone in the Pastel Study, a new white that artists of the period used. Vincent Van Gogh used it as an extender. Sara Zielinsky mentions lithopone as a material used by mid-nineteenth-century artists in an article in the Smithsonian, smithsonianmag.com, which supports this understanding.

Renoir used his porcelain painting techniques and chose the coated starch side of his special paper to create a flat, fresco-like, ethereal-like surface, using pastels, lithopone, and blue watercolor in fresco painting techniques. Critics initially rejected the Grand Bathers because the body type was unfamiliar, although the style was prophetic. They called it the acid period.

Renoir’s Grand Bathers Masterpieces are visions of much volume and light. Nudes are outdoors, in floating colors in the finished pieces having qualities uniting them with the landscape, as Cezanne’s Grand Bathers. Color, space, and unity with nature far outweigh line or the indoor quality of Ingres. The women in the Pastel Study exude infinite oblivion, uniting light, form, and landscape, which echoes and resonates in Picasso’s Blue Period and significantly influences Picasso’s later works. Renoir’s other very enticing romantic studies for the Grand Bathers lack color and intricate necessity, they are unfinished. In these quick studies, line is used for beauty, positioning, and proportions without details. Renoir's finished works and my most crucial Pastel Study emphatically have details necessary for creating the whole. In The Grand Bathers, minute strokes dazzle you into the picture extending from our world, in which color is thoroughly detailed, into Renoir’s works. His great nudes are like his wife, Aline Charigot, with all the elegance and thrust of Rococo, have no social references, thrown into a more modern dimension of genre painting with a type of revolutionary universal goddess lounging outside of time. Jacques Louis David and Ingres are stylistically distanced, far from The Grand Bathers, an experimental future of classless elegance in a world of light. In the Pastel Study, color is spontaneous, as Renoir’s technique of a fragile layer of color left no room for error; the figures are composed of thousands of colorful strokes. This link ties The Grand Bathers Studies to the Impressionist Futuristic Style.

Renoir studied the sculpture The Bathing Nymphs, bas-relief, executed after models designed by Francois Girardon (1628-1715) 1668-70 (lead, formerly gilded) to create an inspired classical-like tight, detailed sculptural Pastel Study of the two front models only creating his new interpretation of infinite light, envisioning a new style in 1883. He was an inspired futuristic visionary at a time of radical social change. He believed in fate and religion, referring to himself as “a cork in a flowing stream,” which took him in new directions in painting to link his utopian ethereal world into his art. His studies, the prologue to his inspired story, The Grand Bathers, experimented in different mediums, while the guillotage paper remained the same.

Every study and masterpiece created by Pierre-Auguste Renoir is different, as his spontaneous responses to the materials varied with his mood. The Pastel Study is like no other but most like the dilemmas of space and infinite desire for heavenly perfection in the Grand Bathers. There are infrared and chemical tests that prove the Pastel Study is historically correct, magnificent, and genuine.

Passage Written by Merrilee Cohen July 14th, 2023