Seated Female Nude, Profile View (Femme nue assise, vue de profil)

Seated Female Nude, Profile View, 1917, was painted two years before Renoir's death in December 1919, when he was seventy-six years old and had been working through severe physical disability for over a decade. In 1917 Matisse visited him at Cagnes specifically to learn and to pay tribute, and the conversation between the two painters — recorded in Matisse's notes — touches on colour, the nude, and the relationship between the artist's physical condition and his painting. Renoir reportedly demonstrated to Matisse how he applied paint by showing him his strapped hands; Matisse's response was that the quality of the painting gave no evidence of constraint. The profile nude as a format had ancient precedent in Greek vase painting and relief sculpture, and Renoir's return to it in his final years suggests a deliberate simplification toward the most elemental figurative statement — a body in space, defined by the clean profile of forehead, nose, chin, and breast against a warm, undifferentiated background.

The profile format simplifies the figure to a clear silhouette that Renoir could build through his late, broadly applied warm flesh tones. Despite the physical difficulty of execution, the flesh modelling retains its characteristic luminosity, with warm highlights and softer shadow passages creating three-dimensional form.