Rising (Le Lever)

Rising (Le Lever), 1909, depicts the intimate moment of a woman rising from bed or completing her morning toilette — a subject with a long pedigree in French painting running from Boucher through Fragonard, and taking on a more psychologically complex character in Degas's bather and toilette series of the 1880s and 1890s. Renoir's version, characteristically, replaces the voyeuristic quality that Degas cultivated with a warmer, more self-possessed quality: the figure is not surprised or observed without her knowledge but simply present in the natural privacy of her morning routine. By 1909 Renoir was painting with brushes tied or strapped to his arthritic hands, a physical adaptation that required considerable courage and determination, and the fact that his late nudes retain their characteristic chromatic warmth and technical fluency despite this difficulty speaks to the depth at which his painting habits were established. He reportedly said that painting was not a matter of the hand but of the eye.

The nude figure is painted with Renoir's late, broadly applied warm brushwork, flesh built from layered pinks, creams, and warm ochres without sharp tonal contrasts. The implied domestic setting is treated very loosely, ensuring the figure dominates through its warmth and chromatic intensity.