Among the great masters of Impressionism, Renoir stands unparalleled in his devotion to the female form. Femme nue couchée exemplifies the artist’s bravura handling of the t.mes less nude and elevates his figure to the level of the divine.

By the early 1890s, Renoir had become increasingly respected within critical circles. Parisian sensibilities had noticeably shifted over the preceding decade, and the contempt and indifference with which Renoir’s Impressionist paintings were received at his Durand-Ruel exhibitions in the 1880s had since given way to much acclaim, evinced by the overwhelmingly positive reception of his May 1892 show. With the change in public attitude, Renoir and his family were able to create a more comfortable living for themselves and join the ranks of the haute bourgeoisie.

Painted circa 1893, Femme nue couchée reflects the artist’s heightened station in life in its subject matter and sumptuous background. While often associated with the rose-colored Rubensian compositions of the 1910s, the female nude is seen throughout Renoir’s career, becoming a more prominent feature from 1890 as his financial stability increased and he became freer to paint his favored motifs. In the present work, Renoir’s sitter is positioned atop a settee rendered fluid swathes of gold, claret and verdigris. These rich jewel-like tones offset the bright opalescence of the figure’s bare skin.

A master of color, Renoir seamlessly blends hues of peach and yellow throughout her body, creating the hollows of her contours with touches of cool blue and grey which in turn are picked up in the white cloth beneath her. The careful delineation of the woman’s form is contrasted against a looser handling of the surroundings and lends a tactility and an immediacy to her figure. Painter Albert André once said of Renoir that he “loved paintings which invite you to stroll through them, if they are landscapes, or make you want to run your hand across a breast or a back, if it’s the figure of a women” (quoted in E. Bell & G. T.M. Shackelford, Renoir. The Body, The Senses (exhibition catalogue), Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 2019, p. 27).

As a student at the École des Beaux-Arts and later in the studio of Charles Gleyre, Renoir was eminently aware of the academic tradition. His early days copying from the masters in the Louvre are reflected in the composition of the present work. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque (see fig. 1) presents a similarly posed nude as seen from the back. While the settings are much the same—both artists’ figures rest upon divans and are framed at right by blue curtains—Ingres’ odalisque gazes knowingly out at the viewer, whereas Renoir’s nude rests seemingly unaware of onlookers. Transported to a natural idyll by virtue of the decorative panel, the figure seems to exist in a dreamlike utopia. Her casual grace and apparent insouciance suggest a t.mes lessness that refutes the trappings around her. The clever placement of the decorative medallion at the right of the composition alludes to Diego Velázquez’ The Toilet of Venus (see fig. 2). Velázquez portrays the goddess of love from a similarly modest angle as Renoir’s nude, while allowing a view of her face in the mirror. Though the medallion in Renoir’s painting is not in fact reflective, it invokes the same response and draws the eye back to the sitter’s partially visible face, suggesting the figure as the embodiment of beauty itself.

While his appreciation for the female figure was well-known and often expressed, the subject of the nude also provided an ideal vehicle for the artist’s enduring quest for the perfect balance of color and form. As his son Jean Renoir recalled, “He told me one day that he regretted not having painted the same picture—he meant the same subject—all his life. In that way, he would have been able to devote himself entirely to what constituted ‘creation’ in painting: the relations between form and color” (quoted in ibid., p. 128).

The identities of his sitters were frequently subsumed by a female type that conformed to his preferred palette and formal arrangements. These anonymous models were typically amateurs or those conveniently at hand. Under his brush, the maids, nannies, nurses and seamstresses who populated the Renoir household transformed into the curvaceous, eternal beauties for which the artist is remembered.

As Renoir’s career progressed into the twentieth century his nudes became increasingly more detached from external referents and were often portrayed in Arcadian-inspired settings. The jewelry and accessories which adorned his nudes in the 1870s and 80s gradually dissipated in his later canvases, as did the distinctive interiors of works like that of Femme nue couchée from the 1890s. The solidity of line which defined his work in the 1880s (see fig. 3) and informed the present work would fully give way to the fluid and rosy-hued renderings of his late career (see fig. 4).

“Renoir’s lyricism, his sense of sculptural form, transfigured [his nude models]…They have become shapes and colors. The world in which they put pearly white, fleshy bodies on display is the world of painting; such is the magic of this art that they are nothing more than the luminous rose, traced in pearl-gray, lavender, and green, supported by harmonious volumes, by masses in equilibrium. Signs, symbols, images of Renoir’s optimistic sensibility, they keep nothing from nature except that which the painter wants them to keep for our intellectual pleasure and visual delight” (Maurice Denis quoted in ibid., p. 119).

Widely respected by his contemporaries and the successive generation of painters like Matisse and Denis, Renoir’s masterful interpretations influenced even the most avant-garde of artists. René Magritte famously completed a series of works in the 1940s which he called “Sunlit Surrealism” or his “Renoir Period” in which he channeled the French artist’s subject matter, smooth brushwork and soft palette, albeit in his typically unorthodox fashion (see fig. 5).

A test.mes nt to its beauty and t.mes less style, Femme nue couchée was acquired by the haute couturier Jeanne Lanvin and hung in pride of place in the grand salon of her Armand-Albert Rateau-designed mansion at 16 rue Barbet-de-Jouy long after her passing (see fig. 6).

This work has been requested by the Städel Museum, Frankfurt for its forthcoming exhibition Renoir: Rococo Revival – Impressionism and the French Art of the Eighteenth Century, scheduled for March through June 2022.