L'œuvre en bref

Nude in the Sunlight (also known under the title Study. Torso, Sunlight Effect) was shown at the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, where it provoked a genuine critical scandal. The journalist Albert Wolff, in Le Figaro, wrote a now famous critique that compared the violet and green patches scattered across the young woman's body to marks of cadaverous decomposition or putrefaction. This violent incomprehension testifies to the revolutionary character of the work, which radically broke with the academic tradition of the smooth, idealised nude. Auguste Renoir inaugurated here a new way of representing the female body in the midst of nature, a subject that would fascinate him throughout his life and culminate in his late great Bathers.

The model, possibly Anna Leboeuf, is captured at half-length, slightly in three-quarter view, in a grove bathed in light. The young woman's flesh, rendered with an extremely free touch, catches an infinity of reflections: soft pinks on the lit areas, subtle mauves and greens in the shadows, suggesting the play of light filtered by the foliage. The surrounding vegetation, rendered through small juxtaposed brushstrokes of blues, greens, and yellows, seems to vibrate around the body like a setting of light. This dissolution of contours into the coloured atmosphere, together with the boldness of painting a nude outdoors with such naturalism, places the work at the absolute avant-garde of its time. One recognises in it the heritage of the great masters of the nude, from Titian to Rubens, revisited with the freshness and modernity proper to nascent Impressionism.

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