This beautifully illustrated study offers the first-ever comprehensive investigation of Renoir’s nudes.Tracing the entire arc of Renoir’s career, this volume examines the different approaches the artist employed in his various depictions of the subject—from his works that respond to Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne, to his late, and still controversial, depictions of bathers that inspired the next generation of artists.Eminent scholars not only look at the different ways that Renoir used the nude as a means of personal expression but also analyze Renoir’s art in terms of a modern feminist critique of the male gaze.The book explores of Renoir’s unceasing interest in the human form, and it reconsiders Renoir as a constantly evolving artist whose style moved from Realism into luminous Impressionism, culminating in the modern classicism of his last decades.The book most compellingly demonstrates how truly radical Renoir was.