Nu couché

Nu couché, at the Musée d'Art moderne de Troyes, is one of Dufy's reclining nudes from around 1930, a genre he approached with the same decorative confidence he brought to racecourses and regattas. Dufy's nudes occupy a specific position in the history of the twentieth-century painted nude — light-hearted, openly pleasurable in their colour, deliberately anti-tragic — placing him in a tradition of French sensuality that runs from Boucher through Renoir. The work's cheerful chromatic warmth exemplifies the qualities that made Dufy one of the most popular painters of his generation.

The reclining figure is rendered in warm flesh tones floated over a light ground, with Dufy's characteristic drawn line providing the figural contour that his thin paint alone could not establish. He handles the surrounding fabric and interior with freely placed colour washes that create a harmonious but not laboured environment for the figure.