Like Braque (see lot 425), and other French artists who found their work at a stylistic crossroads in the years following the end of the First World War, Laurens began to incorporate into his sculpture the classical elements which Picasso had introduced into his non-cubist figurative paintings. Laurens' figures from the mid-1920s possess the stiff and heavy character of Picasso's or Leger's nudes. The underlying cylindricality of the forms harkens back to Cézanne and Cubism. However, Laurens began to turn away from the urge to experiment in purely formal terms, and instead accepted a conservative solution to sculptural form, in order that the subject and its tradition become the clear and dominant themes.