Description
A nude woman leans forward from the waist, her dark hair swept up and pinned, eyes lowered and lips faintly curved as she presses a white cloth to her hip and thigh with both hands. Her body dominates the canvas, rounded and full through the shoulders, breasts and stomach, painted in warm ivory flesh tones that shift into soft orange and rose where light catches the cheek, shoulder and raised arm. A length of coral drapery is bunched under her other hand at the lower right, its folds picked out in ochre and salmon strokes that echo the warmth of her skin.
The brushwork here is soft and blended almost to the point of blurring, forms melting into one another at the edges rather than being drawn with a firm line, a hallmark of Renoir’s late manner. Behind her, a loosely suggested backdrop of golden brown foliage on one side and dark green bushes on the other keeps the setting vague, more a warm, wooded enclosure than any specific place, with a few small pink blossoms dabbed in at the lower left. The whole canvas is built from a narrow, glowing range of warm colors, cream, apricot, rose and olive green, with almost no cool tone to interrupt the warmth.
This is Renoir well into the last phase of his career, when he turned again and again to the female bather as a subject, less interested in a specific setting or story than in the play of light across a rounded, fleshy form. The soft focus and the way the figure fills almost the entire canvas make this a picture built for presence rather than detail: from across a room the warm, glowing body reads as a single luminous shape, an anchor of color and calm that holds a wall without needing sharp contrast or incident to do it.
