French Post-Impressionist Reclining Nude Oil Painting by William Malherbe (1933)

A woman lies stretched across pale drapery, half-asleep, her body and the foliage around her dissolving into one shimmering field of rose, violet, cobalt, and green. This is Malherbe at his most seductive, painting flesh not as smooth modeling but as broken, vibrating color, so the nude seems to breathe in and out of her surroundings, alive and immediate almost a century after he painted her. Up close, every inch of the surface moves; step back, and it resolves into one warm, luminous whole. Signed and dated 1933, from the height of his Paris years, painted with exactly the daring color that drew a 1937 feature in TIME, which reported that critics had marked him as "a talent to watch."

Featured in Time, 1937: https://time.com/archive/6761670/art-malherbe/

About the Artist
William Malherbe (1884-1951) was a French Post-Impressionist and, above all, a colorist. He was exhibiting in Paris before he turned twenty, and rather than settling into one manner, he worked through Cubism, Fauvism, and Neo-Impressionism before arriving at the saturated, jewel-toned style that became his own.

The endorsements he earned tell you how seriously he was taken. He was represented by Galerie Durand-Ruel, the legendary dealer that had risked its fortune backing Monet, Renoir, and Degas when no one else would, and that, as TIME once put it, "seldom take much of a chance." A painter Durand-Ruel chose to show, the magazine noted, was one with enduring ability. They showed Malherbe twice in seven years.

That second exhibition drew a 1937 feature in TIME, which reported that critics had immediately marked him as "a talent to watch" and described him as a vivid colorist of "dashing, brilliant-hued landscapes, flower pieces and nudes." By then his work was already held in a dozen good collections, and in 1926, during his own lifetime, his painting La lecture had entered the Musée du Luxembourg. It is documented today in the collections of the Centre Pompidou.

His story runs through both world wars. Malherbe spent four years in the trenches of the First World War, and the French government entrusted him with commissions to design patriotic posters; he later drew the illustrations for his brother Henry's celebrated war memoir La Flamme au poing. In 1939, at fifty-five, he left France for the United States, settled on a farm in Vermont for the war years, and exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington before returning home to France in 1948.

This painting is signed and dated 1933, from his Paris years, when Durand-Ruel represented him and his color was at its most daring.

Why We Love It
What we love is what Malherbe did with color. The subject is a woman asleep under the trees, calm, still, unhurried. But look at how he painted it. Her body and the air around her are built from rose, violet, cobalt, and green, the shadows themselves alive with color instead of gray. The pose stays restful while the color hums underneath it, so a gentle subject becomes one of the most vivid things you could hang on a wall.

That is the tension that makes it special. Serenity and vitality at once, in a single frame, which is genuinely hard to pull off and rarer still to find in a painting you can actually own.

Key Features:

• Medium: Oil on canvas
• Period: 1933
• Signature: Signed lower right by the artist
• Dimensions: 29.9" x 20.3"
• Condition: Excellent condition. Please see photos for details.
  
• The piece will be shipped from Los Angeles