Nu couché, vu de dos

By 1909 Renoir was 68 and badly crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, living in the warm south at Cagnes with brushes sometimes strapped to his stiffened hands. In these last years he kept returning to the nude, painted warm and full and unhurried, closer to Titian and Rubens than to the flickering Impressionism of his youth. Here a woman lies with her back to us, resting after a bath, the flesh worked in soft reds and pinks against a loose, barely finished ground. The pose looks straight back to a painting Renoir loved, the reclining Venus that Velázquez had shown from behind before a mirror. It is a small canvas, about the size of a large book, made by a man who could no longer easily hold the brush that made it.