The Bather is among the most important surviving drawings by Renoir. It relates, without question, to the famous painting Blond Bather, 1881, in the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown. Renoir is said to have painted this work in Naples while on his first trip to Italy, where he studied the art of the ancient world and the Renaissance, as his fellow Frenchmen had done since the late 16th century.

Benzaiten, or Benten, as the goddess is also called in Japan, is a Japanese Buddhist version of Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of music, poetry, learning, and the performing arts. Sarasvati was first adopted in China and then passed to Japan in the 7th-8th century.

Fascinated by the rural landscape, John Marin has abstracted the environment in rhythmic strokes, allowing both paint and the naked canvas itself to define the composition. Bathers dates from the period in Marin’s career when he began to use oil in addition to watercolor.

The vivid, interlocking planes of color in this work are examples of Synchronism, the art movement created in Paris by American artists Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright in 1913. Synchronism used dynamic combinations of color to define abstract forms.