Pablo Picasso painted this work during his Rose Period of 1904–06, a moment when his palette lightened to fleshy pink hues and his style became more delicate. It was executed as a study for The Harem, a larger composition from 1906 (Cleveland Museum of Art). The standing nude figure was inspired by the bathers in Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’s Turkish Bath (1863, Louvre Museum), which Picasso had recently seen at a retrospective dedicated to the 19th-century master held in Paris at the 1905 Salon d’automne. The model is most likely Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s companion during this time.