This painting is characteristic of Henner’s late work, which featured endless meditations on a similar theme: female nudes reclining in dream-like landscapes, often with mythological references to nymphs from Ovid’s Metamorphoses or to the pastoral idylls of Virgil’s Eclogues. These paintings were so popular that copies and forgeries also proliferated, making it even more difficult to trace different versions.

The son of peasants from Alsace, Henner worked his way through the academic ranks in Paris and was eventually awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome scholarship, which enabled him to study for five years in Rome. Although he went on to enjoy a successful career within the French Academy, Henner’s work sits outside easy classification. He embraced neither the smooth technique and grand narratives of academic history painting, nor the naturalism and bright palette of the Impressionists. Instead, he developed his own idiosyncratic style, blending hazy sfumato brushwork with unusual textured effects and a muted, almost chalky palette.

Alongside his pastoral nudes, Henner was known for his religious subjects and portraits, producing over four hundred portraits alone. His most famous painting is undoubtedly L'Alsace: Elle Attend (1871). Depicting a woman in mourning dress with a tricolor cockade in her hat, it instantly became a patriotic symbol of France’s loss of the territory of Alsace-Lorraine, which was annexed by the German Empire in 1871 after their victory in the Franco-Prussian War.