Sad Face Strawberry Tint

In Sad Face Strawberry Tint, Tomlinson reworks the visual language of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s bathing scenes, particularly his late reclining nudes, often discussed in relation to their saturated flesh tones. The title draws on Sir Kenneth Clark’s infamous description of Renoir’s nudes as a “great big mushy gelatinous fat woman with a sad face strawberry tint,” a phrase that exposes how art-historical language has shaped, judged and consumed the female body through painting.

In Tomlinson’s work, the torso of a reclining bather is cropped and intensified, rendered in dense, strawberry-red tones that blur skin, pigment and surface. The body appears to both cohere and dissolve within the same material field. Across its surface, strawberries are placed like improvised offerings, turning the body into a site of excess, consumption and staging. Rather than critiquing from outside, Tomlinson stays inside the language of painting and art history. She takes the descriptions and criticisms of Renoir’s bathing nudes and makes them literal in the image itself. The “sad face strawberry tint” becomes visible in the painted body: the red, saturated surface of the skin, the strawberry tones across it, and even the way the cropped torso begins to read like a face, with the nipples acting like eyes and the fold of the belly forming a downward, sad expression.

Reframed within Bathers Bathing, the figure is neither idealised nor abject, but part of a system pushed to excess: saturation, instability and pleasure collapse into one another, revealing how the image constructs and consumes the body it depicts. The painting physically enacts both the criticism of Renoir’s depictions of women and a critique of those depictions themselves.Exaggerating how these bodies were described and judged.