Description
A woman lies stretched the full width of the canvas on a day bed upholstered in green and blue. She props herself on one elbow among the cushions and raises her other hand into her hair, and she is looking directly out at you, which is rarer in Renoir’s late nudes than the pose suggests.
The colour is almost entirely warm. Rose and cream flesh, a terracotta floor, a rust red wall at the right, and behind her a curtain painted as loose vertical strokes of ochre, blue green and pink that never resolves into cloth. A white sheet slips under her hips, a blue and white bolster is bunched at the lower left, and a thin gold bracelet catches the light on her wrist. Renoir signed at the lower left.
The handling is broad and unhurried. The figure is modelled almost entirely in half tones, with no dark contour anywhere on her: where the body meets the couch, one warm colour simply becomes another.
