Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915)

This sculpture can be seen to have a close affinity with both Red Stone Dancer and Maternity, although it is less abstract and more refined than these other two sculptures and in the organisation of the arms, and their position in relationship to the head, we have repetition of Gaudier's involvement with the interplay of these masses. This sculpture expresses all the artist's ideas about the simplification of planes as related to masses and as such is one of his most complete and considered statements (R. Cole, op. cit., p. 120).

Gaudier-Brzeska described this sculpture in a List of Works, where this is the last sculpture entry, as 'Femme assise marbre pentélique strié poli à la cire'. In a letter to Ezra Pound sent from the trenches on 20 March 1915, Gaudier-Brzeska describes this work as 'a big marble, a sleeping woman, which you have never seen' (E. Silber, loc. cit.).

The marble sculpture of Seated Woman (1914) is in the collection of the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris.