Seated Woman (Femme assise)

Seated Woman (Femme assise), 1910, is one of Renoir's most distilled late figure types — the seated woman in warm light, reduced to its essentials with minimum compositional elaboration. Albert Barnes, who acquired this and many related Cagnes figure paintings, articulated his theory of Renoir's importance in terms that this kind of work exemplifies: for Barnes, Renoir's achievement was to have made a figure painting tradition continuous with the great French tradition of Watteau, Fragonard, and Chardin while extending it through the chromatic discoveries of Impressionism. The seated woman gives Renoir all he needs — a figure in warm light, clothing providing colour contrast, the face and hands available for his most careful flesh modelling — without the compositional demands of larger multi-figure works. By 1910 such essential simplicity was both the result of physical necessity and the expression of an artistic philosophy that had been arriving at this point for thirty years.

The seated figure is built with Renoir's late, freely applied warm brushwork, the figure emerging from a loosely indicated warm background through tonal differentiation rather than drawn outline. Flesh tones are layered in warm pinks and creams, with the clothing handling more gestural and less defined.