Bathers Playing with a Crab (c. 1897): Art, History and Details

Bathers Playing with a Crab (c. 1897) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

After viewing Renaissance paintings on a trip to Italy in 1881, Renoir attempted to bring greater order and stability to Impressionism by merging flickering light effects with solid forms. He conveyed this new ambition in a series of paintings of nude bathers, a subject that preoccupied him from 1883 until his death in 1919. Avant-garde artists of the 20th century admired his ability to blend modernist and classicizing tendencies.

Object facts

• Title: Bathers Playing with a Crab
• Date: c. 1897
• Creator attribution: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919)
• Culture: France, 19th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 75.5 x 85.5 x 10 cm (29 3/4 x 33 11/16 x 3 15/16 in.); Unframed: 54.6 x 65.7 cm (21 1/2 x 25 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Mod Euro - Painting 1800-1960
• Department: Modern European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1939.269

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Francis, Henry. "Renoir's 'Three Bathers.'" The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 27, no. 2 (February: 1940): 17-18
• Milliken, William. "Silver Jubilee Exhibition." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 28, no.6 (June 1941): 88-108
• Paintings in the Cleveland Museum of Art. [Cleveland]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1945.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.