| This Master's thesis investigates the multiple cultural meanings of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's late works of c.1895--1919. It considers those images of healthy, robust female nudes in terms of their setting in the southern French landscape and their specific cultural associations in contemporary French society. To do so, the thesis conducts a critical biographical reading and investigates issues of tourism, degeneration, and health in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The thesis argues that French concerns for health grew out of social anxieties about a perceived threat of the nation's physical and cultural degeneration. Anxieties about disease, industrialization, infant mortality, and cultural decline were some of the prominent concerns characterizing the fin-de-siecle attitude between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War (1870--1914). Such anxieties were placated by Health Tourism, which, through popular travel literature and medical discourse, encouraged salubrious places as antidotes to the degenerate, industrialized metropolis.; The thesis argues that Renoir's late works, like contemporary travel posters, advertise aspects of Health Tourism of the Cote d'Azur, including the contemporary therapeutic activities of climatotherapy, heliotherapy, and hydrotherapy. It asserts that Renoir's conception of the environment of the Cote d'Azur, formed by the 1880s and consistent until his death in 1919, is decidedly touristic. Forming part of a larger popular phenomenon that privileged the region as a salubrious and rejuvenating environment, Renoir's touristic perception of the Cote d'Azur, as represented in his late works, exists in a network of social, art, and medical histories.; While the late images by Renoir are, at their most personal level, consolatory images of healthiness and youthfulness painted by an elderly, rheumatic man, they can also be considered participants in a wider cultural phenomenon which privileged the South, and specifically the Cote d'Azur, as an escapist site of classical cultural heritage and physical rejuvenation. Renoir's late works are anti-modernist in their nostalgic longings for the classical past, and yet frequently feature signs of the contemporary, melding past and present into a space of alternative modernity which offered rejuvenation, pleasure, and consolation to the ailing artist and to the nation. |
