Rose Nether Poetry depicts a lone figure in darkened, anonymous surroundings. Such paintings have been described as ‘imaginary’ or ‘fictitious’ portraits; they do not represent any specific, identifiable individual. The figure, perhaps identified by the title as ‘Rose’, turns her gaze to engage the viewer. Her eyes are bright, her expression smiling but oblique. She is seated at an angle to the picture plane and twists her torso away from us, raising her left shoulder even as she turns her head to look outwards. Such richness of characterisation is essential to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s picture-making. When asked why some of her figures turn away from the viewer, the artist has said: ‘they don’t always want to give you everything’. The figure’s feet are cropped from view and the artist has stated that she prefers not to picture her subjects wearing shoes, as shoes unavoidably evoke narrow historical parameters that she would rather avoid. To date, her pictures have represented only black figures, and through her work she responds to the historic underrepresentation of black people in Western painting. When asked about the relationship between racial politics and the content of her work, she has stated that ‘I’ve never distinguished my politics from my life. It's in the fabric of what I'm doing.’ She is a Londoner although she is sometimes misconceived as Ghanaian owing to her parents’ nationality; they moved to the UK before she was born. Rose Nether Poetry, as with other confident examples of the artist’s mature work, represents its subject on a scale that reflects the grandeur of Yiadom-Boakye’s vision.

Yiadom-Boakye began to receive widespread critical recognition from 2010 onwards. After graduating from the MA course at the Royal Academy Schools in 2003, she was included in an exhibition of upcoming British artists organised by Charles Saatchi, Newspeak: British Art Now, which was held in Moscow and London in 2009–10. She then held exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, before Corvi-Mora Gallery in London came to represent her. She held her first solo exhibition there in 2011 and has exhibited there regularly ever since. She was nominated for the Turner Prize 2013, which was followed the next year by the first monograph about her (Prestel). Her work has been included in many thematic museum exhibitions including All Too Human at Tate Britain in 2018, which set her work in a lineage of painting that started with Walter Sickert and included Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and others. Yiadom-Boakye’s place amongst the most successful contemporary painters of her generation was cemented in 2020–22 when a retrospective exhibition of her work toured to Tate Britain in London, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, and Mudam Luxembourg in Luxembourg.

Central aspects of Yiadom-Boakye’s practice were summarised in the context of the All Too Human exhibition. In the accompanying publication, Hattie Spires and Dávid Fehér wrote that Yiadom-Boakye’s ‘elegant portraits evoke a loose sense of narrative’. They went on:

"Yiadom-Boakye paints figures not from life but from her imagination, based on composites of images from scrapbooks and drawings that produce a cast of fictitious characters that, once committed to canvas, are difficult to pin down to a particular time or place. Her subjects are always black and often look as though they have been glimpsed resting during a dance lesson (indeed, she cites Edgar Degas and Walter Richard Sickert as influences). She deftly asserts black identity and inscribes it within the tradition of Western painting (particularly portraiture) a history of predominantly white, male painters in which black sitters were nearly exclusively cast in minor roles. […] Yiadom-Boakye famously works quickly, executing most of her paintings in a day, improvising as she works to try to capture a particular moment, fleshing out a character from her imagination as a writer might; indeed, she is a writer as much as a painter."

Yiadom-Boakye is indeed a literary painter whose poetic writings have been published alongside her work. For an exhibition at Stevenson Gallery in 2010, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Essays and Letters, the accompanying publication included her short story ‘Stage Directions for a Short Tragedy’. When she exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery, London, in 2017, the exhibition was called Verses After Dark, and the accompanying publication included texts entitled ‘The Half-Smile’, ‘Problems With The Moon’ and ‘An Inquisition To Divine The Necessary Things’. The title of this painting, ‘Rose Nether Poetry’, suggests an intertextual activity in which paintings and texts are made to interconnect.

In a studio photograph of the artist taken in October 2012, a stack of books includes two about the society portrait painter John Singer Sargent. His suave painterly manner, assured characterisation and occasional studio improvisations, whether of staging or costume, are all relevant precedents to Yiadom-Boakye’s work. In 2017, the writer Antwaun Sargent drew a comparison between her work and the painterly paintings of Sargent and Édouard Manet, specifically the way she ‘moves paint across linen canvases’.