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A young woman sits on a couch, wrapped in cool grey-blue, her warm skin glowing out of the shadows. Renoir painted her in 1876, and her owner later kept the picture hidden in his bedroom for fourteen years.

The story behind the painting

Renoir painted this nude in 1876. It is known by many names: Female Nude, Nude Woman Sitting on a Couch, After Bathing, Pearl, and Anna, after its model, called la belle Anne. Renoir's fascination with the human body ran through his whole career, from the 1860s until his death, and he painted hundreds of nudes. It began in his youth near the Louvre, where he studied and copied Rubens, Boucher and Delacroix while preparing for the École des Beaux-Arts. He admired these old masters but wanted to show women as they looked in real life, not as idealised beauties.

What to look for

Anna is the centre of the picture, surrounded by cold grey-blue tones that make her body seem warmer. Renoir built her form with small, soft brushstrokes and scumbling, thin veils of paint that blur the contours so the edges of the body melt gently into the space around her. Wikidata notes her brown hair, an earring, her back and her gaze turned toward the viewer as she sits. The soft Impressionist touch is used here to emphasise feminine beauty rather than to describe every detail.

Meaning and intent

The body has been called the defining subject of Renoir's art and the one that best shows how radical he could be. His nudes also attract criticism: they are faulted as beauty for pleasure's sake, with models who seem disengaged, which has led to suggestions that they are objectified, and they have been called a form of escapism. His treatment of the torso was not quickly accepted by the public. Yet many fellow artists admired him deeply. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso both bought his paintings, and Picasso made Cubist works in his honour, such as Two Reclining Nudes of 1968.

Legacy

The painting belonged to the composer Emmanuel Chabrier until 1896, when the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel bought it. Two years later it went to the Moscow businessman Pyotr Shchukin, who dared not show it in his gallery and kept it in his bedroom for fourteen years before selling it to his brother Sergei in June 1912. The Soviet state seized it in 1918 and showed it in the 1st Museum of New Western Painting and then the State Museum of New Western Art. Since 1948 it has hung in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.