Reclining Nude (La Source)

Reclining Nude (La Source), 1895, engages the most ancient convention of figure painting — the horizontal reclining nude — in the context of Renoir's late Impressionist figure work. From Giorgione's Sleeping Venus through Titian's Venus of Urbino, Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, Goya's Maja desnuda, and Manet's Olympia, the reclining nude had been a vehicle for successive generations of painters to assert their position within the tradition while adding their own reading of the female body's relationship to the viewer's gaze. Renoir's title La Source (The Spring) places his reclining figure within the nature-woman identification that runs through his late bather subjects, connecting the female body to water and the natural world rather than to the social and economic transactions that Manet's version of the same composition had provocatively implied. His 1895 version is warmer and less psychologically loaded than Manet's or even Degas's treatments, consistent with his consistent preference for pleasure over provocation.

The horizontal composition allows Renoir to build the reclining figure across the full canvas width, modelling the nude with soft, long strokes following the body's contours. Warm flesh tones are placed against cooler greens and blues of the surrounding landscape or water, creating the complementary colour dynamic that animates his best bather paintings.