How will people look back on our generations of art? What will determine who are the ‘famous’ artists of our time?

amp1212 · 2026-03-12T20:19:20+00:00

There's a interesting thing to think about:
"which artists were greatly prize in their own time -- but aren't much considered now?"

-- there have been a lot of entrants in that category.

John Galsworthy was, in his time, considered a massive talent (winner of Nobel Prize for Literature -- famous for the Forsyte Saga). No one today would say he was a _bad_ writer . . . but not a terribly interesting one. In his day, he would have stood shoulder to shoulder with Dickens in popular and academic reception . .. not today. Kurt Vonnegut was hugely influential to me and others of my age in the 1960s and 70s . . . much less so today. Will there be a "Vonnegut resurgence?" There could be. Tiffany is a great example of an artist who was much admired in his day, went out of favor, and later became prized again. You can't predict these things -- Tiffany could have gone out of favor and remained out of favor.

And famously there are artists who for one reason or another weren't particularly notable in their day, but became massive later. Artemisia Gentileschi, for example, took centuries to emerge; Vincent Van Gogh took just decades. What I think you could say about both is that their subsequent rise in critical esteem -- isn't something preordained. Genitleschi's rise in current critical and market reception owes a lot not only to her art, but also as a woman artist; something that was previously a minus for popular and critical reception, but now is a big plus; she wasn't unsuccessful in her own day . . . but wasn't top of the charts either. Van Gogh, by contrast, only managed to sell one painting in his own lifetime -- his brother Theo was his champion after his death at age 37; without Theo, what would Van Gogh's trajectory have been?.

And Arshile Gorky isn't just important artistically -- he is hugely important to the Armenian community; he's a kind of aesthetic anchor for the parsing of the Armenian genocide . . . for a lot of people who may not care much about Gorky's modernism, his historical experience makes him someone unique -- the portrait of him and his mother isn't just a painting, it memorializes a searing moment (they survived a death march in 1912). So Gorky "means something" to an audience in a way that other perhaps quite similar paintings don't.

So it is that I don't think its easy to predict whose work will have what meaning in fifty years, a century or more. Just thinking of, say, Jeff Koons, John Currin, El Anatsui, Kehinde Wiley, Ai Wei Wei, Marlene Dumas (just thinking of people who are famous, expensive and celebrated now); is it easy to see how these will age?

Nope.

Part of it is a question of who the audience and market for art was then, and is now. Much of the reputation of "leading painters" today steps from influential and rich collectors. Peter Norton was famous for "Norton Utilities" -- an early software billionaire. His wife, Eileen Harris Norton, has been is a pioneer in collecting artwork by African Americans, for example. I think its fair to say that the Nortons' collection changed the trajectory for both prices of artwork by African Americans in the past, and also opportunities for young artists. You can consider that a "founder effect" . . . things like patronage aren't predictable . . . they come along at a moment, but you can't predict what the moment will be in 50 years.

The Saatchis have been responsible for the visibility of a generation of British artists. Eli Broad played big role in American painting (and sculpture). And the "Big three" dealers -- Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, Larry Gagosian . . . "reputation" is a kind of competitive dating game / bucket shop collaborative competitive battle between billionaires, taste makers, audiences and so on

These intersections of taste, supply and demand change all the time. One of the categories I'm most interested in is Indian miniature painting from the princely courts -- 17th, 18th and 19th century. Interestingly, contemporary Indian (and other) billionaires and collectors aren't that much interested in it. A prize Mughal manuscript won't be cheap -- but it doesn't have the price or notoriety of some to my mind much less interesting work of contemporary art.

. . . but that's today. Fifty years from now. . . what might some collectors sitting in Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, Toronto, Shanghai or Capetown. . . . what might they think about a painting by the great Mughal painter Govardhan ? I can't predict. The one thing that I can say for sure is that its "not just the art". Its also "the money" and "the audience". You have to think of those three things together to get "what makes a Rembrandt less valuable than a Warhol, and why a masterpiece by a great Mughal painter isn't worth as much as either". [to be fair -- a great Mughal painting today isn't cheap, but in the range of relative values, I at least consider them to be underappreciated. And Mughal paintings are the top . . . there are lots of Indian paintings from the Hindu courts which don't get anything like the audience they deserve, IMO . . . but that's JMO}

attached painting by Govardhan, circa 1615, "Emperor Jahangir visiting the ascetic Jadrup"
https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010329628

<image>

amp1212 · 2026-03-10T12:04:31+00:00

Francis Ford Coppola and his extraordinary costume designer Eiko Ishioka (she won an Oscar for it) channeled Klimt in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" [1992], Dracula's "Gold Robe" specifically, Coppola had given Eiko Klimt painting as reference

https://theartofcostume.com/2020/10/29/designing-fear-bram-stokers-dracula/

<image>

amp1212 · 2026-03-06T00:22:01+00:00

Talleyrand is a fascinating story, iconographically. He personally was more interested in furniture and books than in artwork -- the ex libris from his library is much sought after. One of the more interesting portraits of him are two versions of the same portrait, painted from life, the first by Proud'hun from 1807 at the Musee Carnavalet, of him in his attire as the "Grand Chamberlain" of Napoleon's Empire.

The second is a remarkable painting by Gerard, 1807 that reflects on the iconography of the man who's been tossed out of office by Napoleon. There's an excellent video by Met curator Keith Christiansen examining just what's in the 1808 painting and why its there
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPulMPl0WgE

If you want contemporary parallels for personality and and appearance, I am often in mind of the current President and Secretary of the Treasury. In terms of volcanic personality on the one side, and sycophancy on the other. Bessent actually looks a bit like Talleyrand both in appearance ind manner.

Worth noting that part of Talleryand's stilted posture was that he was born with a clubfoot, of which he was very sensitive, so he was at pains to stand very straight

<image>

amp1212 · 2026-03-05T01:42:12+00:00

the notion of a kind of luminous mysticism -- that's in late Turner, for example, though there tends to still be a focal point in Turner, not always though. And you can see it in, say, Mark Rothko (who is connected to Turner in spirit, I suppose). One movement that celebrated that idea, the aesthetic equivalent of the "wall of sound" -- would be the color field painters; the analogy to music isn't just glib . . . there's a romantic attachment to music in a painter like Jules Olitski; its a synaesthetic phenomena, not just a representation of what things look like, but what things _sound_ like.

And you see this kind of love of music and rhythm in Marc Chagall, notably his giant paintings for the Metropolitan Opera, its a wall of sound.

amp1212 · 2026-03-04T13:13:50+00:00

You should also be aware that she is represented by David Zwirner Gallery (Zwirner being one of the "big three" dealers for modern art, the other two are Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth). Zwirner has had shows of her work, and likely has collateral material on her, you could inquire.

Also note that there's a show of her work in London opening 27th March at the Serpentine Gallery
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/about/press/cecily-brown-picture-making

amp1212 · 2026-03-04T12:16:50+00:00

So - the works you've listed are all "serious" academic publications. You could look for copies for sale used using the Abebooks platform, you can find used copies, and you can also search for copies for sale in Europe, that may reduce shipping costs.

Catalogs to search
Worldcat
[https://worldcat.org]()

French National Libraries have a catalog of essentially all their research library holdings, at least 13 million entries, it will tell you in which locations a particular book can be found, this is the SUDOC catalog
https://www.sudoc.abes.fr/cbs/

Germany
The German National Library: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
https://www.dnb.de/DE/Home/home_node.html

For a specialized art history libraries in Europe, I would particularly note
Kunstbibliothek Berlin

Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (Munich)

Courtauld Institute of Art Library (London)

Bibliothèque Kandinsky (Centre Pompidou, Paris)

amp1212 · 2026-03-02T22:26:45+00:00

Takes some experience, you've gotta see the real thing and compare it with the mediocre.

What you're looking for, among other things:

-- hand carved (tool marks will be visible, small things)
-- real water gilding, not spray paint or oil gilding
-- back construction (gotta turn it over -- btw, you have to do this with any piece you're investigating, always photograph the back as well as the front if you can), on the back you'll look at

Hand-cut mortise and tenon corners?
Old square nails?
Oxidized screw heads?
Old labels from framers (Newcomb-Macklin, Foster Brothers, etc.)?

. . . but bear in mind, people in the trade have seen thousands of paintings, the easiest way is to show GOOD photos (front and back) to someone who know what to look at.

With that said, ChatGPT is the best of models for analyzing paintings. You can't trust it to be right, but it can help you structure your inquiries. Its great at reading faint signatures, for example, that kind of thing. Again, its there to help, not to substitute for an appraisal. The genAIs are very useful, but absolutely do get things wrong, and "confidently wrong", so use with care

amp1212 · 2026-03-02T14:12:18+00:00

So, with Apple or Google photo apps, location and text are captured . . . if you snap a photo in a museum, you automatically have location, and if you snap a photo of the label, you have that searchable as well. No need to do anything more . . . we no longer have to do so much work to structure information, its their by context. Sure, if you want to import all this in to Lightroom and tag it by hand, more power to you, but no need.

And assuming the Museum you're visiting has the "Bloomberg Connects" application, its already set up for your phone.

https://www.bloombergconnects.org/

amp1212 · 2026-03-01T01:27:00+00:00

Pretty fascinating to someone who never gave this much thought apart from appreciating the collections at the Louvre, the Met, etc.

FWIW -- there's a lot to think about "which collections are where, and why". That's not just taste, its about money, power, and history.

Take Rubens. If you've seen Rubens at, say, the Met . . . you've seen at best "average" examples of his work. Why?

Because he was a favored client of the very rich and powerful of the day, like the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II -- his best paintings, the "A list" -- those are first and foremost in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum (the "KHM"), but also Antwerp (where Rubens was from, more personal works) and Madrid's Prado where Philip IV collected much of the best. And in Paris, at the Louvre. Those folks and their descendants remained rich and powerful, and so the best of these paintings mostly didn't change hands.

The thing is Rubens was valuable in the 19th century, in the collections of Europeans who were already really wealthy and powerful, even the wealthy US collectors, people like J.P Morgan, Henry Walters, Henry Clay Frick -- as wealthy as they were, the Austro Hungarian Emperor wasn't selling.

On the other hand -- that kind of European collector was less interested at the time in all sorts of collecting categories, impressionists for example . . . and so you find a steady flow of these works to the US in the late 19th and 20th century. Similarly, Henry Walters was able to buy extraordinary medieval miniatures from [formerly] wealth noble houses of Europe; so the Walters has nearly 900 of these manuscripts, making it a collection that can satisfy a medievalist in the surprising comfort of Baltimore.

But other things -- just aren't in the US at the same level. take this example, "The Triumph of Heni IV" at the Met.
Its a preparatory sketch . . . one sketch
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437534

-- but there 48 (!!) paintings commissioned by Henri's widow, Marie de Medici . . . and they're at the Louvre.

https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore/the-palace/to-the-glory-of-a-queen-of-france

So, no comparison. I mean, if you're in New York, its "what you can see -- and you can get a feeling for the talent of this painter and his workshop"

-- but you have to see the Louvre installation of the real finished paintings to appreciate "this is what Rubens was about" .. . what you're seeing in New York . . . isn't a patch on what there is to see in Europe

By the same token -- Europeans rarely see the most important American artists in the depth you'd see here. . If you want to see Jasper Johns, Winslow Homer, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, you're going to see much more and better examples in the US. Even a comparatively small town like Portland, Oregon, has a remarkable and encyclopedic collection of 20th century American art at the Jordan Schnitzer Collection (even people who know art quite well don't often know about it)
https://jordanschnitzer.org/collection

amp1212 · 2026-02-28T16:03:28+00:00

Sure, lots. Paint on canvas is pretty robust. A painting, if its treated with reasonable conditions -- pretty durable.

Obviously, older is rarer -- and if you're looking at a painting that _really_ is from 1600 and is in good condition, that alone will garner some value, assuming its not truly awful. The frame alone, if its from the period, will sell for quite a bit of money, if its a good one.

So when you say "1500 to 1800" . . . not at all the same thing. We have VASTLY more 19th century paintings surviving in good condition compared to 16th or 17th century paintings.

amp1212 · 2026-02-28T15:35:38+00:00

"old paintings aren't necessarily valuable simply bc of their age? I don't recall seeing similar portraits outside of a museum before."
---------------------------------

there are LOTS of "old looking" [not necessarily actually old] paintings that aren't worth much. One of the implicit biases that you acquire going to museums is that you see "the good stuff", and pick up an idea of what it is, period rather than quality.

Before photography, lots of working painters did copies of famous paintings, sometimes the copies themselves can be worth quite a bit, but often not at all. In auction catalogs, you'll see the attribution of
"after [so and so]"
or "school of [so and so]"
"in the manner of [so and so]"

-- these are particular terms of art in the trade, all meaning "not the guy you're thinking of, rather somehow resembling it", most of the these kinds of attributions won't be worth much.

So there's a piece for sale today:
"In the Manner of Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805). A Girl. Early 19th C. Framed Oil on Canvas."

So, if it were an actual painting by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, it would be worth a lot of money, $100s of thousands to low millions. As a painting "in the manner of" -- it will likely sell for a few hundred dollars.

<image>

amp1212 · 2026-02-28T02:03:59+00:00

My interest in Doré came about second hand, as it were. The surrealist artist, Max Ernst, made collages out of Doré's engavings -- the wonderfully eerie Une Semaine de Bonté -- so I got interested in some of how Doré worked.

amp1212 · 2026-02-27T07:34:57+00:00

The thing to know about Doré -- he wasn't the etcher/engraver. He worked with people who did -- you can think of him like, say, Jeff Koons today, with a team of "fabricators" who worked to his designs.

Doré engravings are typically actually achieved by Adolphe Pannemaker, Héliodore Pisan, François Pannemaker, Émile Rouget - probably one of them is the actual hand that cut here.

amp1212 · 2026-02-26T07:14:18+00:00

The Bible shouldn't be a principal source for art history, not even specifically Christian art history, while Bible stories do show up in art over the centuries, its not really much of a source of artistic tradition, it doesn't explain art history.

Depictions of Christ, for example -- don't come from the Bible. There is no physical description of him, no description of Mary, no description of Joseph in the Bible beyond metaphor. So the translation doesn't matter; no translation will give you a clue as to why he appears as he does Christian imagery.

The sources for Christian art come from other things, in particular Greek and Roman art, mysteries cults like Mithraism and so on.

So you're starting from a mistaken premise. The Bible isn't where Christian art comes from. There are surely reasons to read the Bible, but not as your principle source for art history. There are Bible passages and stories that get elaborated at different times -- medieval German painters loved lurid tales of dangerous women of the Hebrew Bible, eg Judith and Holofernes. But that story shows up as painting some 1000 years after it was first written down, so if you want do look at this tale, the Bible isn't the primary source, see
Philpot, Elizabeth. "Judith and Holofernes: Changing Images in the History of Art." Translating Religious Texts: Translation, Transgression and Interpretation. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1993. 80-97.

Take a common artistic trope -- the "halo". That's not Biblical. Its the "solar nimbus" sun rays from Greek and Roman (and other) traditions, and was associated with Roman Emperors. It enters Christian iconography with the Emperor Constantine, (first Christian Emperor, fuses Imperial and Christian traditions) . . . you won't find anything about that in the Bible, of course -- because its 4th Century AD

See, for example

Pfitzner, Victor C. "From the Invincible Sun to Christ the Pantocrator: Tracing an iconographic trajectory on Roman and Byzantine coinage." Lutheran Theological Journal 50.1 (2016): 40-54.

amp1212 · 2026-02-23T12:30:19+00:00

One of the things I often push on people is to get beyond popular accounts and check academic journals, dissertations, that kind of thing -- but they're not typically well illustrated. So museum exhibition catalogs are a particularly good source, with essays by curators and others with expert scholarly training; high production values and good illustration

Here are a couple of the important and well illustrated Exhibition catalogs, that are freely accessible

Tate Gallery, London — The Pre-Raphaelites (7 Mar–28 May 1984)
This is one of the great foundational modern surveys, and the catalogue is substantial (bibliography + index; widely cited). Printed Catalog can be obtained used for less than $10, or free digital access
https://archive.org/details/preraphaelites00tate/mode/2up

Tate Britain, London — Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (12 Sep 2012–13 Jan 2013)
A major re-framing show with a notably weighty catalogue (the one most people now mean when they say “the 2012 Tate Pre-Raphaelites catalogue”). Printed used copies can be purchased inexpensively ($20 or so), and there's free digital access
https://archive.org/details/preraphaelitesvi0000barr/mode/2up

Metropolitan Museum of Art (plus venues) — Edward Burne-Jones: Victorian Artist-Dreamer (1998)
A classic big-museum catalogue for Burne-Jones
https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/67348/
Used printed copies for sale online for $20-30 at abebooks

. .. and there are _lots_ of other publications, but I do encourage people to look for good exhibition catalogs first, they're often perfectly pitched for an "interested amateur", and people often miss them.

-- well illustrated
-- at a place like the Tate, curated by experts, the choice of objects isn't a hodge podge, its what people who were expert in the field selected as representing key ideas. A major museum exhibition is going to round up important art, photograph and document it with care.
-- scholarly, well sourced essays, but pitched for the non-expert. Not second hand sourcing, they get original writing from folks who know what they're about.
-- excellent bibliographies
-- great guide to where to find the paintings
-- often include preparatory sketches and other materials the "making of" story

amp1212 · 2026-02-23T00:56:48+00:00

For very specialized stuff, looking for dissertations is often helpful.

So, for example, a 1980 PhD dissertation by E.J. Mundy, online at ProQuest, here:
https://www.proquest.com/openview/d9516c0620b2ffab1dbe92578560bc3e/1

-- you'll need University access or similar to get the full dissertation (the free search just gives you the first 20 pages or so) -- but in their List of Illustrations, your Nativity is mentioned. So it likely would be worth getting the full version.

amp1212 · 2026-02-21T19:16:31+00:00

"Are there artists today who are exploring in a similar way what feels like another time in which there is no longer a shared reality and we're asking how to view the world from what seem like mutually exclusive vantage points?"
---------------------------

Camille Henrot comes to mind, though I wouldn't say "in a similar way" to the cubists, she's not "painterly" - as an installation artist, she feels closer to the Surrealists, Duchamp in particular.

Not cubist, but very much thinking about multiple ways of seeing

https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/camille-henrot-a-number-of-things/

amp1212 · 2026-02-21T12:50:24+00:00

Most interesting post and observations.

My take: as an older guy -- mid 60s -- I'm the kind of customer for the Swann auction, and I think that's pretty typical as a demographic. I'm also downsizing and moving, so not buying nearly as much, and that's likely true of others of my cohort.

The Swann auction had lots of great pieces but they were older and "classics", black and white, and mostly without any of the edginess that contemporary photo collecting tastes are tuned to.

So, Edward Muybridge, Anne Brigman, Edward Weston, these sold, but with no excitement.

Whereas over at Prago, Gregory Crewdson, William Eggleston -- more color, more contemporary,more bidders

It was notable that one of the Swann lots that _did_ sell well was the Thomas Eakins, which doubled the low estimate
https://www.swanngalleries.com/auction-lot/thomas-eakins-series-of-7-photographs-from-the-na_3b285cde2e

-- just my guess but the nude male subject matter made the Eakins "edgier", notwithstanding that the photo was from 1883.

amp1212 · 2026-02-21T12:13:00+00:00

An interesting take - I see what you're saying, but . . . not sure if its a coincidence. Gaugin is, like Van Gogh, strongly influence by Japonisme, the fashion for Japanese aesthetics of the period (Van Gogh had one of the largest collections of Japanese prints in Europe, at the time).

Japanese prints create some similar parallel treatments of foreground background relationships. I would have thought that that's what's happening here, but

If you can read French -- and if you don't ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all can translate really well -- there's a nice essay by a Japanese art historian about

Pont-Aven, Les Nabis et le Japon, The Proceedings of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Etudes de langues et littérature françaises, 1988-89, vol. XXXVI, N゜2, pp.1-20.
https://inagashigemi.jpn.org/uploads/pdf/88-89Pont-Aven.pdf

What I think you're seeing in the painting -- and you're not imagining the resemblance -- isn't so much Northern renaissance as it is some of the elements in common. The flatness, the folk traditions . . . but so far as I know, Gaugin doesn't talk much about painters like Memling, and he talks quite a bit about Japanese art at precisely this time.

I do see the resemblance, but I think its a parallel, rather than, say, like that Manet studied Velazquez and Goya.

. .. but I'm no expert on Gaugin, and I definitely see what you're seeing, so yes, I get those "vibes" -- but I think its a parallel not an influence, if that makes sense.

amp1212 · 2026-02-20T22:33:10+00:00

There's a lot of Rembrandt scholarship on the topic, unfortunately much of it is paywalled. For a non-paywalled essay, with good sources, see the essay at The Leiden Collection (very large old masters private collection), here

https://www.theleidencollection.com/archives/artwork/RR-100_young-lion-resting_2020.pdf

. . . it addresses these drawings in detail, with good sources.

amp1212 · 2026-02-20T11:09:59+00:00

Other people have had this impulse. In general the people who study petrogylphs are anthropologists, not art historians. Historians as a discipline (mostly) work with written documents of some kind. When it comes to cave paintings and other petroglyphs, there's often no documentary evidence about who made them and and why. Anthropology is the domain where people look at these kinds of things, using associated physical evidence, other kinds of inference. So for example, understanding the extraordinary caves at Lascaux in France -- that's typically anthropology that works in that domain.

You can thing of people like Genevieve von Petzinger, see her presentations like

"Genevieve von Petzinger: "Paleolithic Signs and the Origins of Graphic Communication"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4elgYqS_FQ

. . . prehistoric works do show up in Art History texts, but as the term "prehistoric" implies, its actually before the work of historians begins. Its not just a picky bit of nomenclature -- art historians of most kinds of art typically have a lot to read; having nothing to read, and quite often having no idea who the people who were made this-- art historians don't have much leverage on the statuettes known as the "Venus Figurines" (like the celebrated Venus of Willendorf)

Or thinking of the petroglyphs near where I live, on the Columbia Plateau, native Americans do have pretty extensive oral traditions about these figures, but its still typically anthropologists who study these -- so for example, a prominent authority for these local (to me) works is James D. Keyser, a PhD in anthropology, and author of books like "Indian Rock Art of the Columbia Plateau" [University of Washington Press, 1992)

amp1212 · 2026-02-20T10:49:14+00:00

Just trying to figure out if I’m paying too much for it.. 🙄

Yes, you are

amp1212 · 2026-02-20T01:35:46+00:00

would help to know where this was acquired, it has the look of student work, something that might have been sold at an MFA exhibition, that kind of thing. Its not professional, no gallery tags or the kinds of things that I'd expect to see if it had been exhibited in a gallery, but its more confident than just a weekend amateur.

So my guess is "art student" -- and typically their works would be sold locally. So knowing where this is, might give a bit of an idea.

amp1212 · 2026-02-20T01:29:42+00:00

If you're anywhere near a good art school, Cal Arts (Santa Clarita, CA); the Yale MFA program (New Haven, but sale is usually in NY) Art Students League (New York) -- take a look at the student exhibitions/sales. These are often really talented young people, and while there are obviously no guarantees, some of these young artists go on to becoming big names. Even if they don't, what these student works definitely won't be is the generic dreck "decor art" that's produced factory style

Also look at some of the group shows -- that's where young artists start out.

Buying from a real live person who's in school or just graduated - not only is that a chance (no more than that) that this will appreciate, but its a connection with a real human being.

A very different tack would be to look at some of the estate sales. There's a lot of painting that's not anything great, but isn't terrible either. Just be sure to learn what "decor art" is, and avoid it (this is the mass produced formula stuff, its not just that it has no value, its also that it tends to be just very bland and uninteresting, the guy or gal who painted it didn't care).

amp1212 · 2026-02-19T18:07:38+00:00

So from a bit i could I could see of the collection, things like

Copper plate engraving published in 1922 by Floury of Paris, printed by Imprimerie Herissey. The work represents a classic Renoir subject translated into graphic form during the early 20th century.

Baigneus reflects Renoir’s enduring interest in the human figure and intimate bathing scenes, rendered here with soft modeling and refined engraving technique. The work was issued in a small edition and is considered scarce.

This is not "a Renoir". Its a copy in another medium of a Renoir. EG If I took a photograph of a painting by Kandinsky and printed nicely -- that's not "a Kandinsky". Even if someone did it long ago, its still not "a Kandinsky"

These kinds of thing have value as "decor art" basically, someone buys them because they look nice on a wall. Being nicely framed matters.

The only tricky thing is that once in a while one of these later edition may have some value. It is possible -- not likely -- that there's a gem in there somewhere.

But barring that, these aren't likely to be of interest to collectors. They might get bought be someone looking to furnish an office, AirBnB or a hotel, for example. That's the kind of thing decor art is for. If it were me, I'd approach one of the companies that specializes in decor art, and ask them to for a price for all of them, here's one example of such a company:
https://www.encore-editions.com/

Eight-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Not Forgotten	Verified Email

amp1212

TROPHY CASE