The critics were split over by Laura Knight's pictures at the 1929 RA. The veteran critic Alfred Lys Baldry did not generally like Lavery's nudes, finding them 'aggressive', but the Daily Express wrote 'If Laura Knight were only a man she would probably be the next President of the Royal Academy. ... There are plenty of pretty pictures in the Academy, but Mrs Laura Knight does not paint "pretties." Her figures are living human beings of solid flesh and form. For sheer actuality there is nothing else in the whole Academy that can stand up to them.'

The model was the artist Eileen Mayo, who had a distinguished career as a print maker and illustrator, particularly after her emigration to Australia in 1952, and New Zealand in 1962. In 1921 her father died and in 1926 her mother and sisters emigrated to New Zealand. Her career had stalled, and she was nearly destitute. Modelling saved her, particularly for Laura Knight, who was nearly thirty years her senior. Knight described her as ‘the loveliest of girls, with bright yellow hair as fine as spun gold and big dark grey eyes. She is Irish and Spanish in descent. I put her in all my chief pictures' (The Star, 2 November 1927). Eileen, contrarily, said in an interview: 'I find posing a very tiring job and I shall give it up as soon as I can afford to do so. But there is always the rent to pay. And by the way the stories that Dukes and millionaires are always proposing to famous models are just ‘twaddle’’ (Daily Herald, 15 April 1930). From 1927, Laura Knight, and her friend the painter Dod Procter, painted several pictures featuring the 'Golden Girl', as Knight called her. She often posed nude, but refused a request from Augustus John to model because she guessed he might expect her to do ‘other work'.