In “Nude”, Renoir presents nudity as an image of natural beauty without the mythological veil. The model, well-known among Parisian artists as “beautiful Anna”, was a typical Parisienne of the 1870s. Renoir admires the soft rounded lines of the female shape and depicts coolish shadows on the skin, thus emphasizing the lively trembling of a warm human body. 

The artist turned away from precision of contours and the traditional modeling of form, instead achieving the amazing effect of a living body through the richness of color. He uses sliding brush strokes and applies them one upon another so that they illuminate and sparkle, making colors intense and luminescent.

The painting was presented at the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876. Its value was not understood by conservative critics. For instance, Albert Wolff wrote in Le Figaro: 

This is how some critics perceived the impressionist technique of discretely applying clean colored brush strokes.