This important plaster belonged to Roger Fry (1866-1934) the key figure in the promotion of avant-garde art in Britain in the early twentieth century. Fry wrote the first article in English on Maillol: The Sculptures of Maillol (published in The Burlington Magazine, April 1910) and included Maillol’s work in his landmark exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which was held at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910.

Maillol's great achievement was to rid sculpture of descriptive detail and narrative story lines and to concentrate instead on purely sculptural qualities: this is why he is so often called the father of modern sculpture, and why he was so admired by fellow artists such as Matisse, Picasso and Arp.

This sculpture is a later work which takes its inspiration from The Mediterranean, the seated large figure which caused a sensation when it was first exhibited at the Autumn Salon in 1905: 'It is beautiful: it means nothing', Andre Gide famously said of it. In this small but powerful study, we see Maillol's predilection for modelling the human figure according to basic geometrical forms.