A figure with a long and interesting history in Cézanne's art, this reclining nude first appears holding a mirror, in a small, heavily painted picture of 1970 (Venturi, Lionello. Cézanne, son art--son oeuvre. 2 vols. Paris, 1936, no. 111); then as Leda with her hand in the swan's beak, in a painting of 1886-90 (ibid., no. 550), for which there is also a preparatory drawing (Chappuis, Adrien. The Drawings of Paul Cézanne. 2 vols. Greenwich, Conn., 1973, no. 484); and finally in an extensively revised canvas of the same period (Venturi, Lionello. Cézanne, son art--son oeuvre. 2 vols. Paris,1936, no. 551), in which her right hand and the swan are overlaid with the drapery and fruit of an unfinished still life. From the beginning, and most clearly in the present drawing, Cézanne seems to have relied on a graphic model for this uncharacteristic image of a voluptuous nude with flowing blond hair, altering only the raised right arm, but his specific source has not been identified. Theodore Reff, from Paul Cézanne: Two Sketchbooks (1989), p. 41.