Nude with a Jug

By the 1920s Derain was taking photographs more and more often, a habit he had kept since 1910, and the museum links this large canvas from 1925 to that practice. A photograph has been found of a model sitting in almost exactly this pose, and the painter may have worked from it. Later he reused the pose, unchanged, in one of his engravings. The woman is life-size, seated on a rock with one knee drawn up, in a landscape of brown and green hills with a lake beyond. Her face is fixed and mask-like. Parts of the body, outlined in black, are carefully modelled, while others are left as a sketch. The painter reworked the sky himself, and the hills probably once took up more of the canvas. The jug of the title stands by her foot, on a white cloth.