Water

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Bronze

Musée d'Orsay

Water is a small bronze sculpture by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, created in 1916 in collaboration with the young Spanish sculptor Richard Guino, who physically modeled the clay under Renoir's close direction while the artist's hands were severely crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. The work depicts a crouching washerwoman rinsing laundry — a figure conceived in an everyday but classically informed spirit as a personification of the element Water, one of a pendant pair alongside a companion piece representing Fire. The sculpture belongs to Renoir's late foray into three-dimensional work, in which he sought to marry the sensuous, voluminous female form central to his paintings with the monumental traditions of Greco-Roman sculpture. Cast in bronze by the Valsuani foundry and signed by Renoir, the piece exemplifies his enduring preoccupation with the female figure as an embodiment of elemental nature.