This monumental seated nude is part of a series that Braque did in the 1920s during the return to classicism that characterized avant-garde art in response to the chaos of the First World War. Eschewing the experimental playfulness of analytic cubism with its multidimensional shattering of forms, Braque returned to the classical subject of the female nude, here replete with a basket of fruit, the conventional attribute of Demeter (Greek goddess of the harvest).

Braque’s muscular, somewhat androgynous nudes of this series appear to be in direct dialogue with Picasso’s equally monumental, classicizing women of the same decade.