Desnudo femenino, Anna

By 1876 Renoir was still years away from selling much of anything, and a nude like this was a hard picture to place. The model was a young woman called Anna, and Renoir painted her in the soft, broken light he'd been working out with the other Impressionists outdoors, only turned inward onto skin. Critics of that moment complained his flesh looked mottled, even decayed, all those flecks of green and violet in the shadows where they expected smooth pink. The painting eventually reached Moscow through the collector Sergei Shchukin, who bought so boldly that he kept some pictures at first only in his bedroom. It hangs now in the Pushkin Museum, one of the Impressionist works that left France early and never came back.