Description
A nude woman stretches the full length of a low upholstered couch, one arm raised behind her head, the other draped along the top rail as her fingers curl loosely over the wood. A pale cloth is bunched at her hip, the only covering on her body, and her bare foot reaches almost to the picture’s left edge. Her head tips back against a bolster patterned in gold and blue, dark hair pulled up, cheeks flushed pink, eyes half closed in an expression of pure ease rather than a fixed pose.
The whole canvas is built from warm, buttery color, rose and ivory flesh tones laid on in soft, rounded strokes with almost no hard outline anywhere on the body. The couch itself is a field of olive green and ochre, the cushions streaked with gold, and behind it a curtain or wall dissolves into loose smears of rust red, moss green and pale blue that never resolve into specific objects. Light seems to come from everywhere at once, softening every edge of the figure into the surrounding color.
Dated to 1915, this belongs to Renoir’s late manner, when arthritis had stiffened his hands and he painted with broader, looser strokes and an ever warmer palette, returning again and again to full-bodied reclining nudes in richly colored, half-described interiors. The thick, almost sculptural handling of the flesh and the near-total dissolving of the setting are hallmarks of this final decade of work.
As wall art it commands a room through color alone, a wide field of warm rose and gold that reads strongly from a distance, with the reclining pose giving it a long, calm horizontal weight suited to a wall above a sofa or mantel.
