A Nymph by a Stream

Renoir painted this reclining nude around 1869, when he was in his late twenties and still poor, working out of doors with his friend Monet and inventing what would soon be called Impressionism. He casts the woman as a naiad, a river nymph from Greek myth, the traditional excuse for painting a nude. The model, though, is a real person he knew well, Lise Tréhot, his lover in these years, and he lets her stay recognisably herself rather than smoothing her into an ideal the way an academic painter would. She appears in more than 20 of his pictures from this time. When he laid her here beside the stream she may already have been expecting a child, a daughter born in the summer of 1870.