Naked Woman in a Landscape

By 1883 Renoir was quietly unhappy with Impressionism. He had recently travelled through Italy, studied Raphael in Rome and the ancient wall paintings dug out of Pompeii, and came back wanting firmer edges and drawn, solid bodies. You can watch that change happening in this picture. The landscape behind the seated nude is still loose and shimmering, painted the old Impressionist way, but the woman herself is modelled with a new clearness of line, as if lifted from a different tradition. She sits on a white cloth by the water, drying one leg. The model is thought to be Suzanne Valadon, then an artists' model, later a serious painter herself and the mother of Maurice Utrillo.