Nude Woman Sitting

By around 1900 Renoir had largely settled on one subject and stayed with it: the female nude, painted in warm, heavy flesh tones as if lit from inside. He was nearing 60, and rheumatoid arthritis was already stiffening his hands, though he still worked long days at the easel. In that same year, 1900, the French state gave him the Legion of Honour, a decoration some of his old Impressionist circle thought a little too respectable for a group that had begun by being refused by the Salon. A seated nude like this one belongs to those late years, when he wanted painting to be, in his own words, a pleasant and cheerful thing. It hangs today in the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City.