The artist is fully clothed, wearing a scarlet knitted cardigan and large hat, with her face viewed in profile, silhouetted by a light area of the painting depicted in the background.

At the time when Knight had attended art school, female students were not permitted to paint live models, being restricted to copying casts and drawings.

Writing in The Telegraph, art critic Claude Phillips called the painting "harmless" and "dull", "obviously an exercise" which "might quite appropriately have stayed in the artist's studio", but also said that it was "vulgar" and "repels".

It was sold at Sotheby's later that year for £700, the highest price achieved in the sales by her executors to clear her studio, and it was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1971.

In The Face of Britain (2015), the historian Simon Schama described it as a "incomparably, her greatest work, all at once conceptually complex, heroically independent, formally ingenious and lovingly sensual."