Description
A nude woman is shown from the waist up, her long auburn hair falling loose and unbound around her bare shoulders, a few strands caught with a dark ribbon or comb near her temple. Her head tilts slightly, eyes half closed, lips faintly parted in an expression that reads as drowsy or lost in thought rather than posed for the viewer. Both breasts are visible, her flesh painted in warm rose, cream and soft ochre, with quick pink touches marking the cheeks and lips.
This is a rapid, loaded-brush study rather than a finished portrait, the paint dragged on thickly and fast, especially in the hair, where strokes of copper, gold and dark brown tangle together without individual definition. The background is a mottled field of olive green, gold and streaks of blue, applied in broad sweeps that never settle into a specific setting, letting the warm flesh of the figure sit forward against the cooler, restless color behind her. A signature appears at the lower right.
Dated to 1915, this comes from the same late period as Renoir’s most physically massive nudes, when he worked with a wide, loaded brush and an ever warmer, more saturated palette, often producing quick studies like this one alongside larger, more resolved figure paintings. The looseness here is not carelessness but a fast, confident shorthand built from decades of painting the same subject.
On a wall it reads as warm and immediate, a close-up field of rose, gold and green with enough scale in the head and shoulders to hold a smaller wall, an intimate, painterly nude rather than a grand set piece.
