Racial Difference, Immigration, and Abolition in Van Gogh’s Reclining Nude

When Vincent van Gogh (1853-90) lived in Paris, he generated imagery that strikes at the heart of working-class reform under the French Third Republic (1870-40), such as urban expansion, gardens for the poor, and factory conditions. Scholars, however, rarely put his work in dialogue with the socio-political issues swirling around him. This paper will focus on one facet of his Paris-period: the relation between racial difference and clandestine sex work.

In 1887, he generated images of a dark-skinned woman who has remained unknown to art history. The most developed image, Reclining Nude (Barnes Foundation), has received little attention, due in part to the mysteries surrounding the figure’s identity. Fellow painter Émile Bernard noted that the woman was a sex worker willing to pose nude. Van Gogh mentioned her briefly in a letter and elsewhere compared the marginal status of sex workers to an unknown artist. Both, he felt, were vulnerable in a system that suppressed individual agency.

This paper will draw from recent scholarship (e.g. Denise Murrell and Katherine Brion) on racial difference in modern painting and novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin to investigate how Reclining Nude engages with issues of immigration and abolition. The painting appeared when policies surrounding brothels in Paris loosened, immigration surged on the outskirts of the city, and abolitionist rhetoric influenced sex-work reform. Reclining Nude, I argue, used the female form as an allegory for racial and artistic tension to convey the unwitting failure of reform efforts.