About this work
A woman mid-motion, caught in the most private choreography of getting dressed — this is the world Shinn claimed as his own. Nudes were a recurring subject in Shinn's work, and his life drawing skills were more developed than many of his fellow Ashcan painters. In *Nude Pulling On Stocking*, the figure bends or perches with focused attention on the mundane ritual at hand, her copper-red hair the painting's chromatic anchor — a warm, insistent note against the soft, warm interior tones that surround her. The composition is close and unhurried, without the theatrical grandeur of Shinn's stage scenes; the palette likely runs to golds, flesh tones, and the low amber light of an intimate room. The figure is neither posed nor performing — she simply exists, absorbed in herself, which is precisely where the painting's quiet authority lives.
By circa 1925, Shinn had returned to New York after several years working as a Hollywood art director and was re-establishing himself as a painter. With his pockets full of Hollywood money, he returned East to resume his career, finding ready work decorating Long Island mansions with sumptuous rococo murals — it was, after all, the era of the Great Gatsby. Through the 1920s and 1930s, Shinn worked on a variety of artistic projects, spending little time on easel painting. His boudoir nudes of this period belong to a quieter, more personal current in that output. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s he cultivated a market for deftly-made drawings in the spirit of a latter-day Watteau or Boucher — and this painting sits squarely in that tradition, filtered through the frank, observational eye he had trained since his Charcoal Club days. He had exhibited pastels at Goupil's in Paris — the same gallery in which Degas had shown pastels of nudes in 1885 and 1893 — and the lineage is unmistakable: a woman observed without ceremony, the intimacy of the *après-toilette* elevated into art.
This is a painting for rooms with natural light and unhurried attention — a study, a bedroom, a reading room where things are kept that reward looking. Because of his interest in atmospheric interior scenes, Shinn's works have an intimacy that some of the other Ashcan artists lack. It speaks to the viewer drawn to figuration that feels earned rather than staged — work that owes something to Degas without pretending to be European, rooted instead in the particular American frankness of a painter who saw the body as simply one more subject worth getting right.
