Reclining Nude (Gabrielle)

The Salon d'Automne of 1905 in Paris is remembered for one room, where Matisse, Derain and their friends hung canvases in such raw colour that the critic Louis Vauxcelles called them fauves, wild beasts. Renoir showed nine paintings at that same Salon, and this reclining nude was one of them, a picture in the long line of lying nudes that runs back through Ingres to Titian and Giorgione. The model is Gabrielle Renard, the family's nanny, with a rose tucked into her dark hair. Critics liked it, and Renoir's dealer Paul Durand-Ruel encouraged him to paint it again. Two later versions of the same size followed, now in the Musée de l'Orangerie and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. Hungary bought this first one in 2019 for 12.3 million dollars, the highest price the Budapest museum had ever paid, and in 2023 the three hung side by side there for the first time.