Painted in 1916, the present work is a splendid example of Suzanne Valadon’s lush female nudes. The model is likely a young woman named Gaby, who worked as the artist’s housekeeper during World War I. She and Valadon became friends, the latter even proposing that Gaby marry her son, Maurice Utrillo (though the marriage did not take place). Because Valadon often used friends, family or acquaintances as her models, her female nudes often take on a portrait-like quality, made even more apparent by her realistic depictions of their figures.

Her nudes are not overly sexualized nor presented with Classical perfection; instead, the artist’s time as a model (for artists including Puvis de Chavannes, Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir, no less) inspired a preference for depicting her subjects as they were: working class women, imperfect yet self-possessed. As André Warnod has noted, “The black outline of the nudes makes the contour clear but leaves intact the touching sensitiveness of the flesh, flesh which is sometimes soft and sometimes slack. The pitiless lines, precise and firm, may emphasize the defects…a good drawing is not always a pretty one–but the flesh is always alive and beautiful because of the life that breathes through it…The nudes she paints with such a clear and radiant palette are enchanting because of the truth that emanates from them” (quoted in Jeanine Warnod, Suzanne Valadon, New York, 1981, p. 60).

This is not to say that Valadon abandoned art-historical reference points completely, but rather that her lack of formal academic training and past as a model allowed her to reinvent its tropes in a manner unique to her experience. In this way, Nu allongé sur un canapé draws on both canonical and contemporary imagery: the subject’s reclining position is reminiscent of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, while the patterned textiles upon which she rests evoke the decorative backgrounds employed by the Nabis at the turn of the century and Matisse in the following decades.

Further, while her female contemporaries Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot depicted the female nude in more demure settings, à la toilette or as mothers with children, Valadon’s work reflects her absence from the upper-class world into which they were born and the corresponding social roles women with their upbringing were expected to play. Poet and critic Franco Carco observed: “The nude figures of Madame Suzanne Valdon strike a quite exact balance between the rigor of a masculine vision and that something which, out of an intention that is piteously equal, but from an obscurely defensive instinct, is deliberately left to the feminine touch…The art of today can look upon her as the most realistic woman painter of the nude” (quoted in ibid., p. 65)