The intense and colourful personality of Manolo, as Hugué was known in art circles, earned him considerable fame and many good friends, largely thanks to his inventiveness and an ability to assimilate new teachings that made him one of the most renowned sculptors of his time.

He created this sculpture during the time he spent in the French town of Ceret (Pyrénées–Orientales department, Languedoc–Roussillon), after leaving Paris and shortly before moving to Caldes in 1928. In those years he learned to take on board and incorporate anything that would add to his aesthetic vision, without overlooking all that he had learned in Paris. And although he laid great store by the aesthetic elegance of Auguste Rodin’s work (1840–1917), Hugué instilled his own personal language into his compositions—a language predicated on what he picked up from the new art movements. Those were the years when the art dealer Kahnweiler (1884–1979), his patron and mentor, lent the artist unconditional support in an attempt to disseminate his work internationally, though he also had to exert pressure when Manolo occasionally failed to fulfil his commissions.

His output as a sculptor, much more abundant than his production as a painter and drawing artist, focused on genre subject matters and female figures, the latter treated with an exuberant and naturalistic vernacular based on the study of the nude from various angles and positions but without ever stripping his models of their own personality.

A close inspection of this Femme couchée is awe-inspiring. It shows the artist’s ability to masterly and synthetically capture the precision and sensuousness of the volumes of this woman who rests in a serene and thoughtful pose, deeply engrossed in reverie.