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Artwork Description Nude on Armchair* Patrick Ross Arnold’s Nude on Armchair is a figurative interior that uses the seated nude as both subject and compositional anchor. The work is built around the contrast between the figure’s warm flesh tones and the cool whites, blues, grays, and dark browns of the surrounding environment. This temperature contrast gives the painting much of its visual strength, allowing the body to emerge from the chair while still remaining integrated into the larger atmosphere of the room. The composition is organized diagonally through the sitter’s body. Her bent leg draws the eye inward from the lower left, while the torso and lowered head pull the viewer toward the upper right. This diagonal movement keeps the seated pose from becoming static. The armchair, by contrast, provides a stable architectural framework. Its pale drapery creates soft folds and broad planes of light, while the darker background and right-side armrest contain the figure within the space. Arnold’s handling of fabric is one of the most visually successful aspects of the painting. The white drapery is treated as an active field of movement. Folds are built through cool blue-gray shadows, pale yellow highlights, and loose painterly transitions. The saturated blue cloth across the back of the chair introduces a bolder chromatic note, creating a strong counterpoint to the otherwise muted palette. It also helps separate the figure from the chair, preventing the pale skin and pale fabric from blending too softly into one another. The figure is rendered with a loose but attentive touch. Arnold does not overly define the anatomy, yet the body remains believable through the use of shadow, mass, and directional brushwork. The violet and mauve shadows along the torso, arms, and legs give the figure a sculptural quality, while the warmer highlights suggest flesh without becoming overly literal. The treatment of the face is intentionally restrained, with the sitter’s features partially obscured by shadow and hair. This choice shifts attention away from portraiture and toward bodily presence, mood, and form. The painting also makes effective use of unfinished or simplified passages. The rectangular color fields in the background, including the terracotta, gray, and dark brown areas, give the work a modernist sense of construction. These passages prevent the scene from becoming purely illusionistic. Instead, Arnold allows the viewer to remain aware of the painting as a painted surface, balancing representation with abstraction. Nude on Armchair succeeds as a work of quiet figural observation. Its strength lies in the relationship between body, fabric, color, and interior space. Arnold presents the nude not as an idealized symbol, but as a grounded human subject. The painting’s looseness gives it immediacy, while its careful color relationships and compositional structure give it lasting visual interest. |
*The title of this work was assigned by Visard Gallery. |
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About the Artist Patrick Ross Arnold (1950 – 2021) Patrick Ross Arnold was a Philadelphia-area painter and educator whose work combined direct observation with expressive color and increasing degrees of abstraction. His long association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts began at least by 1987, when he received the Academy’s William Emlen Cresson Memorial Travel Scholarship. He later returned to PAFA as an instructor, teaching painting and drawing before retiring. Although best documented as a landscape painter, Arnold’s broader body of work encompasses still lifes, interiors, figure studies, and increasingly abstracted interpretations of the natural world. Contemporary newspaper coverage reveals an artist who was actively involved in the cultural life of the greater Philadelphia region. In 1992, Arnold—then identified with Penn Valley—was included in the Main Line Center for the Arts’ second annual Painting and Sculpture Exhibition. The following year, he served as one of four juror-exhibitors for the center’s Artists Choose Artists, an exhibition created to introduce the work of recent art-school graduates from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. His participation in the exhibition suggests that Arnold was regarded not only as a working artist but also as an experienced voice capable of recognizing and encouraging younger talent. Later in 1993, the University City Arts League presented a month-long solo exhibition of Arnold’s paintings, with the show appearing repeatedly in The Philadelphia Inquirer’s gallery calendar from late September through October. In 1994, his landscapes were included in Artists of Manayunk and East Falls at the Paley Design Center of the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. In his review of that exhibition, Inquirer critic Edward J. Sozanski described Arnold as a landscape painter who combined an expressionist touch with a rich Post-Impressionist palette. Sozanski noted Arnold’s tendency to break a landscape into its component forms and reconstruct it through high-key color, particularly saturated blue-orange and yellow-purple relationships. This description offers a useful key to Arnold’s wider practice. Whether depicting a wooded landscape, domestic interior, floral arrangement, or human figure, he relied on broad planes of color to establish structure and atmosphere. His paintings remain grounded in recognizable experience, yet their simplified forms, heightened palettes, and visible handling of paint frequently push the image toward abstraction. A 2000 exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania’s Burrison Gallery featured Arnold’s drawings, landscapes, and still lifes, demonstrating that observational work remained central to his practice even as his visual language continued to evolve. Arnold’s place within Philadelphia’s artistic history is further affirmed by the Woodmere Art Museum, whose collection contains four of his works: Woods Around Wissahickon Creek, September, Peck, and Leverington Garden. These works reflect his sustained engagement with the landscape and neighborhoods surrounding Philadelphia, particularly the Wissahickon and Roxborough areas. His career was ultimately curtailed by frontotemporal degeneration, after which he retired from teaching and ceased painting. A 2013 profile documented more than 100 framed paintings and drawings and over 400 unframed works remaining from a lifetime of artistic production. Today, Arnold’s work stands as a distinctive contribution to Philadelphia regional painting—observational yet emotionally charged, deeply connected to place, and animated by an adventurous command of color. |
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Provenance* 1980s - 2021: Patrick Ross Arnold 2021 - 2026: Melissa Meyers 2026 - Present: Visard Gallery *Provenance and attribution details are based on our best research and are offered in good faith but are not guaranteed. Please contact us through the contact form with any questions prior to purchase. |
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Nude on Armchair - Patrick Ross Arnold, c. 1980s
$750.00
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Nude on Armchair - Patrick Ross Arnold, c. 1980s
$750.00
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