Nudo disteso

In 1881 Renoir went to Italy and it unsettled him. Standing before Raphael in Rome and the wall paintings dug out of Pompeii, he decided his own Impressionist manner had grown formless, and he came home wanting firmer drawing and clean outline. This reclining nude of 1883 is that new resolve. The pose looks straight back to Ingres's Grande Odalisque in the Louvre, the long body seen from behind, turned to meet us, but Renoir swaps the cool harem beauty for a pink-cheeked, sunlit girl, and sets the sea and coast of the Channel behind her instead of a curtain. He later called this stretch his sour, dry manner. It lasted only a few years before his brush loosened again.