Michael Andrews was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art between 1949 and 1953, and Standing Nude was most likely painted in the life room there. It depicts a female figure seen from behind, her arms limp at her sides and her heels brought slightly together. Such undemonstrative poses were common at the time, as can be seen from another nude life painting by Andrews from the same year and two more by his friends and fellow Slade students Craigie Aitchison and Euan Uglow. Although it is a student work, Standing Nude is an accomplished painting that already suggests the fastidious working methods that characterised Andrews’s mature work. The completeness of Standing Nude is apparent from a comparison with the contemporaneous Seated Nude, in which the background is only lightly indicated by thin washes of paint and from which the model’s feet are absent. The background and surroundings in Standing Nude are detailed by dry, delicate applications of thinned oil paint; the space immediately in front of the figure is indistinctly but detectably darkened by a penumbra of the shadow cast by the model. The figure itself is finely modelled in a narrow range of tone, within which Andrews has discovered a large number of flesh tones. As with other Slade life room paintings of the period, Standing Nude was executed without gestural or textured handling of the paint. The keynote was one of austere naturalism, in which respect the Slade School at the time was following the lead of its new principal and spiritual talisman William Coldstream who was appointed in 1949.

This painting formerly belonged to the celebrated actor Richard Attenborough. His collection of twentieth-century British art included works of the highest quality ranging from Walter Sickert to Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson via Duncan Grant, Keith Vaughan and Victor Pasmore. It is not known where Attenborough acquired Standing Nude, but he also owned an early self-portrait by Andrews (1958–59), which he bequeathed to the Tate Collection. He loaned both paintings to Andrews’s important retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 1981; the accompanying catalogue identified him as the owner. Shortly after the exhibition, Attenborough sold Standing Nude to Andrews’s dealer Anthony d’Offay. It was purchased from d'Offay in May 1982 by a distinguished private collector, who died in 2024 and whose collection is being dispersed by Piano Nobile.