Reclining Nude

Kirchner signed this at the lower left with his name and a short 09, for 1909, when he was still working in Dresden. The canvas is unusually long, about one and a half metres across and only half that high, so the woman can stretch out along its whole width. The Museum of Fine Arts singles out what makes it so typical of those years: colour pushed far past nature, a deliberately rough surface, and the speed of a sketch kept in the finished picture. Its later path is only partly known. Someone pencilled the name Flechtheim on the stretcher, the name of Alfred Flechtheim, one of the leading German dealers in modern art, but whether the painting ever passed through his hands is not known. By 1948 it belonged to Elisabeth Ris in Zurich, who lent it that summer to the Kunsthaus there for a show of German Expressionists, under the plain title Liegende, a woman lying down. Boston bought it from a London gallery in 1957.