Reclining Woman, 1922 Fernand Leger (1881-1955)

We create our paintings with museum quality and covering the highest academic standards. Once we get your order, it will be entirely hand-painted with oil on canvas. All the materials we use are the highest level, being totally artist graded painting materials and linen canvas.

We will add 1.6" (4 cm) additional blank canvas all over the painting for stretching.

High quality and detailing in every inch are time consuming. The reproduction of Fernand Leger also needs time to dry in order to be completely ready for shipping, as this is crucial to not be damaged during transportation.
Based on the size, level of detail and complexity we need 8-9 weeks to complete the process.

In case the delivery date needs to be extended in time, or we are overloaded with requests, there will be an email sent to you sharing the new timelines of production and delivery.

TOPofART wants to remind you to keep patient, in order to get you the highest quality, being our mission to fulfill your expectations.

We not stretch and frame our oil paintings due to several reasons:
Painting reproduction is a high quality expensive product, which we cannot risk to damage by sending it being stretched.
Also, there are postal restrictions, regarding the size of the shipment.
Additionally, due to the dimensions of the stretched canvas, the shipment price may exceed the price of the product itself.

You can stretch and frame your painting in your local frame-shop.

Once the painting Reclining Woman is ready and dry, it will be shipped to your delivery address. The canvas will be rolled-up in a secure postal tube.

We offer free shipping as well as paid express transportation services.

After adding your artwork to the shopping cart, you will be able to check the delivery price using the Estimate Shipping and Tax tool.

The paintings we create are only of museum quality. Our academy graduated artists will never allow a compromise in the quality and detail of the ordered painting. TOPofART do not work, and will never allow ourselves to work with low quality studios from the Far East. We are based in Europe, and quality is our highest priority.

A lemon-yellow body sprawls across the canvas like a warm engine casing, its curves ringed in soot-dark outlines. Fernand Leger gives us a reclining nude, yes, but she arrives armoured: limbs are built from metallic tubes, joints read like couplings, and the belly turns into a smooth, pressurised volume.

Her pose nods to the old odalisque tradition – that long history of women arranged for looking – yet nothing here pretends to softness. A striped bolster props her head, but it feels as firm as a factory roll. The background behaves like a set of industrial stage flats: black bands, white panels, and two little black circles in white squares that look uncannily like rivets or machine dials. Even the blue-and-white diamond pattern behind her, so domestic on paper, becomes a hard, optical rhythm.

Color does much of the emotional work. That yellow is not the blush of skin; it is enamel paint, sunlight on metal, something you might smell as it dries. Against it, Leger sets cool grays and smoky browns, then punctuates the whole with crisp blacks that clamp forms into place. Depth barely bothers to unfold. Instead, shapes press forward and sideways, like components laid out for inspection.

Look closely at the modelling on her forearm: the paint shifts in soft gradients, almost airbrushed, but the edges stay uncompromising. That tension – volume without tenderness – is where the picture lives. In her hands sits an open book, rendered with the same insistence as any object. Leger once spoke of making “everyday poetic images,” with the manufactured thing as the leading character; here, the book and the body compete on equal terms, both given an “absolute” sculptural weight.

Cubism is in the bones of this, learned after seeing Braque and Picasso, yet the mood is different. Where Picasso can feel barbed, Fernand Leger steadies the scene into a kind of industrial classicism, close to Purist clarity. Perhaps that is why her face, simple and frontal, seems calmly detached – not seducing, not suffering, simply present.

Standing in front of Reclining Woman at the Art Institute Chicago Illinois, one might imagine the room falling quiet, as if the modern world has paused to listen to its own machinery purr.