It has been suggested (by Richard Green, Etty scholar) that the date of this painting is about 1838, based on the resemblance of the right-hand model to the model for his Somnolency in Aberdeen Art Gallery, which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in that year. Both the poses, derived from close study of classical sculpture, and the rapid, painterly handling, are typical of Etty at his best. Etty was an obsessive ‘nympholept’, despite (or perhaps because of) his strict Methodist upbringing. He took delight in the fleshiness of the body and painted it with an enthusiasm bordering on mania. His biographer Alexander Gilchrist wrote that he was ‘never weary of watching each shifting curve and outline, each tint, and tone, graduation of shade or colour, amid the inexhaustible effects of the Models before him; he reproduced and interpreted them, as neither Old Master nor New had done before’ (Life of William Etty, R.A., 1855).

After his death, the artist JE Hodgson perceptively remarked ‘He proposed one thing to himself, to paint the naked body, and his views did not extend to the fullness of its beauty, to the grace of its curvature and the perfection of its structure; they were confined to the representation of the colour and the lustre of its skin’ (Magazine of Art, 1889, p 386). His subjection of disegno to colore in his painting was born out of his admiration for the Venetian masters Titian and Veronese.