Nude Figure of a Girl

The Ashmolean Museum's Nude Figure of a Girl, dated 1885, belongs to the intensive figure study programme Renoir pursued during his Ingresque period as preparation for larger exhibition works. The Ashmolean at Oxford, one of England's oldest and most important university museums, began collecting French Impressionist work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century through gifts and bequests that reflected early British enthusiasm for the movement. This figure study shows Renoir's dry-period technique at its most characteristic: the drawing more defined than his earlier work, the surface more controlled, yet retaining the warmth that prevented his formal experiment from becoming academic in any reductive sense. The nude as a subject carried commercial importance as well as formal significance: Renoir's nudes were among his most consistently collected works, purchased by wealthy collectors who found in his version of the female nude a combination of classical tradition and contemporary sensibility that the academic painters of the Salon could not match. His refusal of the cold, porcelain finish of Bouguereau and his insistence on warmth and human specificity gave his nudes their distinctive character within the broader field of nineteenth-century figure painting.

The mid-1880s nude shows Renoir's 'dry' period technique — the brushwork more controlled and the drawing more precise than his purely Impressionist nudes, the influence of his intensive study of Ingres and Raphael evident in the careful contour and smooth surface. The flesh modeling maintains warmth despite the increased structural discipline, and his characteristic sensitivity to the way light plays on skin is retained throughout the period of stylistic reconsideration.