Reclining Nude (with Cigarette)

In Reclining Nude (with Cigarette), Tomlinson reworks a figure from Louis Courtat’s Reclining Nude, in which the female body is staged within a controlled tradition of passive display. In Tomlinson’s painting, the figure is relocated to a pond within a carefully composed, brightly coloured, picturesque landscape of Impressionistic foliage. The scene is saturated and decorative, maintaining the visual language of pastoral leisure and painterly harmony.

The reclining nude lies motionless within this setting, her body inert, her expression wide yet unreadable. She exhales cigarette smoke slowly into the air; the plume sits within the image like another decorative element, absorbed into the same register as colour, light and foliage. Only on closer inspection does it become apparent that another cigarette has already set parts of the landscape alight.

The fire does not interrupt the scene; it is folded into it, indistinguishable at first from brightness and colour. The work holds surface pleasure and underlying destruction within the same visual field, where nothing breaks because nothing needs to—everything continues, even as it burns, and the figure remains entirely indifferent within it.