Nude Girl, Seated

Van Gogh attended the Antwerp Academy briefly in the winter of 1885–86 and subsequently studied at Fernand Cormon's Paris atelier, where life drawing from nude models was a central part of the curriculum. This 1886 seated nude at the Van Gogh Museum documents his engagement with the academic tradition of figure study as formal training, placed in tension with his own instinct for expressive rather than technically correct figure rendering. He wrote to Theo from Antwerp about the frustrations of academic drawing — the insistence on smooth, correct contour — and described his own approach as more energetic and less concerned with finish. The female nude subject also placed him in dialogue with the Impressionist tradition of the bathing or dressing figure, particularly Degas and Renoir, whose approaches he was encountering through Theo's gallery contacts. The tension between these influences — academic correctness, Impressionist immediacy, and his own expressive directness — is visible in this transitional work.

The figure is rendered with a combination of structural line and brushed color that sits uneasily between academic modeling and Impressionist looseness, reflecting Van Gogh's transitional moment. The palette, while warmer than his Dutch nudes, has not yet achieved the chromatic boldness of his later figurative work.