Figure Studies

A half-draped figure stands with head bowed and one arm raised over it, a white cloth wrapped low around the hips. It fills a panel only about 20 centimetres high, laid in quickly in oil against a dark ground, the kind of study a painter makes to settle a pose before it goes into a finished picture. The Museum of Fine Arts gives it no date, and the museum's photograph is in black and white, so its colours cannot be judged from the reproduction. The attribution to Alma-Tadema is the museum's opinion rather than a certainty. The panel came to Boston in 1965 with the bequest of Mary Stacy Beaman Holmes, the widow of Edward Jackson Holmes, whose family had also owned Alma-Tadema's Woman and Flowers.