This masked female nude is the best known of the few surviving figure studies drawn from life by Thomas Eakins, the premier Realist painter of the United States, who spent virtually his entire career in Philadelphia, where his primary subjects were the life and people around him. A gifted teacher, Eakins stressed that the study of art should be based on the figure as drawn--or better yet, painted--from life, not from casts of antique sculptures, which was then the standard practice; his disregard of contemporary taboos against use of the nude model in mixed-sex classes (which explains the concealed identity of this sitter) led to repeated conflicts with the schools where he taught. Eakins combined in his work his profound artistic and scientific interests, insisting on developing compositions through calculated measurements and perspective studies and on becoming familiar with the human body through intense anatomical study, dissection, and modeling. In this nude study, the rough, blocky massing of solid, lit, and shadowed forms reflects his emphasis on the essential construction of the human figure rather than details of pose or anatomy. Ann Percy, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 228.