Nude Woman Reclining

This small canvas, barely 40 centimetres across, comes from the two years Van Gogh spent in Paris with his brother, and it shows him trying something he almost never touched, the female nude. In the mid-1880s a reclining naked woman was still a loaded subject in the city, argued over in studios and newspapers ever since Manet, and painting one was a way of stepping into that modern conversation. You can see Paris in the handling too, the short separate strokes and the lighter colour he had taken from the Impressionists and the younger painters he drank with. He made only a couple of these nudes and then let the subject go, and within a year he had left the city for the south.