Euan Uglow established a reputation primarily as the painter of female nudes, and Zoë is among the most successful and widely appreciated of these paintings. It was reproduced on the front covers of both Modern Painters magazine in the summer of 1997 and the complete catalogue of the artist’s paintings ten years later. Although Uglow was accustomed to extended working periods, the six years it took to complete Zoë was unusually protracted. It is unclear whether sittings continued throughout that period, or if it was made episodically. Writing in The Uglow Papers, Mark Dunford mentioned that he and some of Uglow’s other students at the Slade School of Fine Art ‘one day [...] took him to the Covent Garden bead shop when he was obsessed with making a blue necklace for a model to wear in a picture’. That picture was Zoë. The eponymous model was the daughter of a woodworker and joiner who like Uglow lived in Turnchapel Mews in south London. This is the only painting by Uglow that she modelled for.

As with many other paintings by the artist, Zoë implies a gaze which is simultaneously coldly dispassionate and sexually interested. Positioned at the picture’s edge, the woman’s breasts and nipples are emphasised by their partial exclusion, even as her raised right arm pulls the breasts higher and makes them more visible. Yet her facial expression is placid and disengaged; the pupils of her eyes are painted with remarkable openness, even to the point of vacancy. Aspects of dressing-up further veil the picture with a sophisticated, mannerist sensibility: the brilliant blue beads round her neck and the heavy dark wig, which is in blatant contrast with the colour of her eyebrows, are both playfully theatrical yet seriously and fastidiously exact. Nevertheless, by dressing the naked body where it need not be dressed, Uglow produced an erotic charge akin to Lucas Cranach’s draped and bejewelled mythic and biblical nudes.

The surface of Zoë records an extensive activity of measuring and an intensive process of observation. The figure is aligned to the proportions of the support, the picture plane is bisected along the vertical and horizontal axes by finely scraped incisions, and the woman’s profile abuts the central plumb line. Each short, fine mark records a measurement. They were made with various bright colours, purposefully made visible against the otherwise naturalistic colours of the painting: red, orange, green, blue, yellow. These marks accumulated at certain junctions significant to the proportions of the subject and the picture. Tonal transitions between neighbouring areas of shadow are carefully managed, and the palette uses a narrow range of colours to model the figure with considerable detail. The shadows around her mouth are green, while the flesh tones encompass a large number of hues in pink and purple.

In her complete catalogue of Euan Uglow’s paintings, Catherine Lampert wrote about Zoë with unusual warmth and partiality:

'Uglow prepared for this ravishing portrait of Zoë by making the blue glass-bead necklace and giving her a wig to wear. She lies nearby on the black “examining” couch in a position in which her breasts receive the most light. The picture took six years to complete, and it includes some of the most beautiful tonal transitions in all of Uglow's work.'

Lampert discussed the painting further in her introduction to the catalogue:

'When Uglow asked Zoë to pose he supplied her with a heavy black wig, the result a large head set off by the blue-beaded necklace. She lies on a leather couch, like that of a psychoanalyst; her raised flattish arm facilitates close scrutiny of her breasts and nipples (she was measured when inhaling). The centre line grazes her right cheek, the diagonal is tangent to the curve of her breast. “If you were to sit in that chair, you'd find the plumb line went along the central line there” [...]. These alignments were not nominally set for erotic reasons; rather like a hurdle, they challenge the artist to demonstrate his own statement that a painting can “never be too perfect”. After six years’ work on Zoë the pricked and drawn marks still testify to the affective bond between something that gives pleasure, like “making” a painting of a pretty girl, and the charm of the girl.'

The painting was made on a canvas laid down on a thick piece of board. The support was probably prepared by Uglow himself. At some point during its execution, the artist decided to crop the image along the left, right and lower edges, and a ruled pencil line was drawn to indicate the desired position of the enclosing frame. The lower and left-hand edges are largely unpainted, while the right-hand edge has been worked upon but not brought to completion. The reverse of the board has been affixed with the artist’s own blue-edged label, which he used to sign and title the painting. In this case, the label also says ‘not yet varnished’. If Uglow eventually varnished the painting, the varnish was applied in an exceptionally thin layer; the paint surface is characteristically flat, matt and legible.