The 'blue hour' is a magnificent period of twilight, just after sunset and just before sunrise, when the sun falls below the horizon line and the remaining sunlight takes on a deep blue shade. A profoundly beautiful effect, earth's blue hour has long inspired artists.

Fig. 1, Circa of Canova, Venus Italica, ca. 1822-23, marble. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Tamara de Lempicka takes the natural phenomenon as a point of departure for her painting: framed by soft blue, an elegant nude model is De Lempicka's primary focus, whose body is contoured by striking geometric shadows created by the light conditions. Whilst the subject and handling of form is archetypal Tamara de Lempicka, it is the present work’s palette that makes it so striking. Instead of the saturated greens and reds that prevail in so much of De Lempicka’s output, this painting achieves a transcendent sense of harmony and calm through complementary cool pigments. The model stands like a Greek statue, whose pigmentation has given way to organic marble tones over the course of time. De Lempicka’s admiration of Classical and Renaissance art was well-known, and the presence of Italianate sculpture is keenly felt in the present work (see fig. 1). Indeed, it is de Lempicka’s synthesis of aesthetics both Renaissance and Art Deco that generates her distinctive and sensual aesthetic.

De Lempicka originally painted a version of this composition, titled L'heure bleue, in 1931. She returned to it in the late 1950s and created four more iterations, of which ours is second. L'heure bleue III is most like the original picture, with striking suggestions of sails occupying the right half of the canvas. Alain Blondel, writer of the artist's Catalogue Raisonné, comments on her uncharacteristic return to the subject, explaining that 'De Lempicka must have been particularly pleased with it'. She elected to gift this version to her friend, the Contesse Réginald de Warren, in whose collection it remained until 2014.