Girl Sitting depicts a naked female figure reclining in space. Unlike Lucian Freud’s paintings, in which every element of the background was resolved with precision, the figure in this print is here allowed to float in an ambiguous space. The surrounding environment of the studio is omitted but for a corona of shadow around the head and shoulders. The whole figure is illuminated by brilliant frontal light and the downcast aspect of the model’s head causes it to fall into charismatic shadow. The attitude of the figure is undemonstrative and naturalistic, even as it exaggerates the swelling, protuberant forms of the body. An awkward contrapposto causes the hips, shoulders and knees to jut outwards in a rhythmic pattern: raised left shoulder; jutting right hip; crooked left knee. The elevated perspective causes further disturbances to the figure, the folded back knees contract the body upon itself and produce a horizontal emphasis in the composition, while the arms are partially concealed behind the torso such that the right arm is altogether absent from the picture. Several tentative areas of abandoned outlines, notably around the right foot and the left knee, have been allowed to register as pentimenti in the plate; they register as remnants of exploratory drawing. The volumetric qualities of the body, with its rounded joints and fleshy definition, especially the belly and breasts, were described using minimal, localised areas of hatching, crosshatching and stippling. Only a relatively small area of the plate was worked upon, with extended zones of highlight produced by the whiteness of the paper. A considerable gulf is apparent between the lightness and efficiency of Freud’s etching idiom, on one hand, and the palpable, massive quality of the human figures he created with it, on the other.

Girl Sitting relates to other etchings of naked female figures from the mid-eighties. These include Blond Girl (1985) and Girl Holding Her Foot (1985). In each case, the surroundings are not detailed, yet the figures do not float. They have mass; they hang heavy in mid-air, leaning or resting on unseen items of furniture. Unlike those works, the composition of Girl Sitting was cropped after the plate was completed; the top edge of the plate was cut away ‘to revitalize the composition’. The prints specialist Starr Figura described Girl Sitting as one of ‘four major plates that rank among [Freud’s] most daringly rendered compositions to date’. Freud started using larger plate sizes in 1987, and the greater size served to magnify the presence of the subject. Girl Sitting almost certainly depicts Harriet Vyner, and the composition of the etching is partially foreshadowed in an earlier drawing of Vyner which is inscribed ‘H V’. Vyner is distinguishable by her high forehead screened by a thin fringe of hair. The composition of a reclining female nude in contrapposto pose recurred in Freud’s work of the mid-eighties, and a painting of Sophie de Stempel, Night Portrait (1985–86), shows the model reclining on a covered mattress, her legs closed and crooked at the knees, and the whole figure viewed from a raised perspective.

Girl Sitting was published by James Kirkman in London and Brooke Alexander in New York. It was printed by Marc Balakjian at Studio Prints, London. It was given as a present by the artist to a friend whom he nicknamed ‘Arb’ (as in Arborio rice), hence the inscription ‘Arb from L’.