Female nude with a jug 1925

This is Andre Derain’s ‘Female nude with a jug,’ hanging here in the Musée de l'Orangerie. The colours are earthy, but that blue in the background… it’s got a life of its own. I can imagine Derain, brush in hand, circling the canvas. He probably started with the nude, then built the landscape around her, testing how those blues and browns play together. It's like he’s asking himself: how can colour create form? How can form create space? The woman’s body is solid, grounded, but there’s also something classical about it. And that jug! It’s so simple, so present, it almost feels like another figure in the painting. Look at the red drapery: It's like a little echo of Matisse, but Derain’s doing his own thing, pushing and pulling, trying to find a balance between representation and pure painterly invention. Painters are always talking to each other, you know? It’s a conversation that goes on across centuries, each one building on what came before, but always with their own accent, their own way of seeing the world.