This work is an excellent example of the portraits of women by this artist from Andalusia, who was also a successful practitioner of other genres, including landscape and still life.

Although De la Serna began his training in his home city of Granada, he moved to Madrid to further his studies in Fine Arts and to copy the old masters in the Prado museum. Once in the capital, he became friends with major players in the world of art and culture, like the painter Manuel Ángeles Ortiz (1895-1984), Andrés Segovia, Manuel de Falla or Federico García Lorca, whom he wished to pay tribute to by illustrating his first book, Impresiones y paisajes, in 1918. His trip to Paris in 1921 would prove critical for his later career as an artist.

There he became familiar with the work of some of the Spanish artists living in Paris: Pablo Gargallo (1881-1934), Juan Gris (1887-1927) and Julio González (1876-1942), but he was more directly influenced by the practice of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), who took him under his wing.

His painting moved between Impressionism, —though never reaching abstraction— and expressionistic figuration. This female portrait, like other paintings of female faces he made in the 1930s, contains echoes of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Picasso. The identity of the portrayed woman is unknown, although she may have been the artist’s own wife, whom he married in 1929, as revealed by some gouaches of female portraits of that time and an oil painting from 1937 where the model wears similar clothing.