Cursiter was not only a successful painter but a pioneering Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, proposing the creation of a national gallery devoted to modern Scottish art as early as the 1930s. At around the date of this study he painted several pictures of women in white, sometimes using the same dark-haired model and including a small female sculpture in the background. He also painted still-life subjects in which white was the dominant colour. The marble statuette in this painting - a sensual reclining nude - plays a vital role in its composition, reinforcing the model’s femininity and emphasising her living warmth and reality in contrast to itself. Cursiter’s freely flowing and creamy handling of paint in this scene owes a debt to late nineteenth-century French art, in particular to Manet, but other works he painted in the very same year were strongly influenced by the restless angular forms that characterised the radical new Italian movement, Futurism.

Stanley Cursiter CBE RSA RSW HON LLD, 1887-1976

Born in Kirkwall, Orkney, Cursiter moved to Edinburgh to follow a career in architecture. After serving an apprenticeship as a chromolithographic designer he was admitted to Edinburgh College of Art. He was a keen follower of Post-Impressionism and the Futurist works shown in London in 1912, and on his election to the Society of Scottish Artists he arranged for a part of the exhibition to be shown in Edinburgh the following year, thereby introducing the Scottish public to the works of Cézanne, Gaugin, Matisse and Van Gogh.
Cursiter became a pioneering and visionary gallery curator and administrator after his appointment in 1925 as Keeper at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Later he was a Director of the National Galleries of Scotland and, from 1948, a full-time painter in his native Orkney.