![Ignacio Zuloaga - Madame Souty Reclining on a Sofa [1921]](http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5573/14655950167_9b1ee90397_o.jpg)
Painted in 1921, Zuloaga's gloriously brazen depiction of Marcelle Souty reclining in the artist's Paris studio is one of his most audacious portraits, and arguably his greatest painting of the nude. The work is a remarkable culmination of a series of large scale oils of the sitter that Zuloaga painted over a seven year period. With but a red 'fascinator' clipped jauntily to the top of her head, and a lace mantilla draped languorously over her right shoulder and upper arm, Madame Souty poses decorously naked on a rich green drape as she gazes out to the viewer's right, her half-smile and unflinching stare expressing an enigmatic air of cool indifference. The studio props that surround the model evoke a culture and inheritance for Zuloaga that go back centuries: an eighteenth century tapestry acts as a backdrop; part pulled back, behind the tapestry are glimpsed photographs of works by El Greco and Velázquez. The candour of Souty's pose however, her implicit decadence mirrored in the louche sag of the green sofa covering, evokes a modernity utterly in keeping with the brave new world and social order that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the First World War.
[Sold for £713,250 at Sotheby’s, London - Oil on canvas, 144.5 x 177 cm]