The painting shows a figure of a young, nude woman with shortly-cropped dark hair lying on a bed partly covered by a sheet and set against a green background.
The composition combines classical artistry with the bold aesthetics of the Art Deco movement and "exudes an air of sensuality and mystery, typical of Lempicka’s exploration of female empowerment and eroticism".
Rafaëla, who served as the model for the picture, was a young woman whom the painter met in the Bois de Boulogne, an area notoriously frequented by prostitutes.
[5] According to Patrick Bade, her rendering of Rafaëla is "amongst the most potently erotic works of de Lempicka in which the desire of the artist for the soft and curvaceous body of the model is palpable".
She goes on to observe the model's similarity of appearance to some of the most popular Hollywood film stars of the era stating that the artist wanted to encapsulate the beauty standards of the 1920s "fast and modern society".