Reclining Nude

Frank Duveneck's essay in the timeless theme of female beauty, Reclining Nude presents the figure in a provocatively foreshortened pose complemented by dramatic highlighting. The model's elevated left hip, extended right leg, and averted face seem designed to emphasize her erotic allure at the expense of individual persona. Perhaps asleep, she lies sprawled amidst a tangle of drapery in which her right arm is partly buried. On the studio floor beyond, several vessels, including a large clay amphora, form an exotic backdrop in the dim shadows, while blossoms scattered in the foreground echo both the purity and the sensuality of the body. Its subtle contours are carefully delineated, while the surroundings are more quickly sketched, with the rapid, dashing brushstrokes by which Duveneck had earlier made a name for himself as a painter.

Beginning around 1890, Duveneck painted many studies of nudes, of which some fifteen are extant. He may have turned to this subject, as he did to landscape, as an escape from the tedium of commissioned portraits. Additionally, his interest in the nude may have been stimulated by his work between 1890 and 1892 as a teacher at the Cincinnati Art Museum, where, like other progressive American art instructors of the time, he stressed the study of the live, nude model in the painter's training. A large, fully finished work, Reclining Nude evidently was created as an end in itself, however, rather than as a teaching aid. Its history—for whom or for what setting it was made—remains unknown.

In late-nineteenth-century America, the nude figure was still a disquieting subject, a vehicle for proscribed erotic feeling unless figuratively clothed in a moral theme or historical narrative. The female figure in an unredeemed state of pure nudity was an artistic subject only for private consumption in unmixed company; even in the all-male public setting of the saloon, the nude could arouse controversy, as when a group of Cincinnati matrons clamored for the removal from one such establishment of a Duveneck nude they had never actually seen. Many of Duveneck's nudes are notable for their straightforward realism, which emphasizes the fact of the model posed in the workaday setting of the studio. Reclining Nude, by contrast, recalls the penchant for the exotic that flavored much of the artist's early figural work. The seeming abandon of her pose, the dramatic lighting of her body, and the metaphorical suggestiveness of the props that surround her combine to make this one of Duveneck's more overtly sexualized studies of the female form.

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