By the early 1890s, after a decade successfully exhibiting at the Salon, Alfred Boucher (d.1934) had established himself as one of the leading French sculptors of the period. In 1894 Boucher was commissioned to execute two stelae, one in Paris, the other in Lyon, in memory of Auguste Burdeau, the Maritime Minister who had died in the same year. The present figure and its alternative version modelled with drapery have been adapted from the Burdeau Monument (see lot 223, offered in these Rooms, 2 March 1995). Showing his figures in the same pose, the rock of the Burdeau stelae, against which the nude woman leans while she watches a ship sailing out to sea, has been replaced here with a tree-trunk, on which she inscribes words of history.