Nude Woman Sitting

Nude Woman Sitting at the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City dates from around 1900, the beginning of the period when Renoir was consolidating his late nude style in the south of France. The Museo Soumaya, founded by Carlos Slim and housed in the distinctive aluminum-clad building in Mexico City, holds an important collection of European art from medieval to modern periods. By 1900 Renoir had moved from the outdoor, Arcadian bather subjects of the 1880s and early 1890s toward a more interior, studio-based approach to the nude — the later works tend to show the figure in warm, ambient light that could be studio illumination as easily as outdoor, the setting dissolved into golden atmosphere. His nudes from this period were compared by contemporaries — including Julius Meier-Graefe, whose 1912 monograph on Renoir was among the first serious art-historical studies of his work — to the Venus figures of Titian and the bathers of Rubens, comparisons that accurately identify the tradition he was consciously aligning himself with while transforming it through the Impressionist legacy of colour and warmth.

Renoir renders the seated nude with his characteristic late-period technique — the body modeled through warm, rounded brushwork that achieved the golden flesh quality his late nudes were celebrated for. His handling of the light on the figure's skin, the warm tones of the body, and the compositional relationship between the figure and its setting creates the specific sensuous atmosphere of his late nude subjects. His palette in late nudes tends toward the warm reds, oranges, and golden tones that gave his figures their characteristic glowing quality.