Torse, effet de soleil

In April 1876 the Impressionists held their second group show, and the critic Albert Wolff walked through it for Le Figaro in a fury. Standing in front of this nude, he wrote that someone should explain to Monsieur Renoir that a woman's torso is not a mass of decomposing flesh, with its green and purplish blotches. What offended him was the shadow. Everyone had been taught that shadow is just a darker version of a thing's own color. Renoir painted the shade on this woman's skin in greens and violets, the colors of light filtering down through leaves onto her back. He was not painting rotting flesh. He was painting a woman sitting in the dappled sun of a garden.