The academic culture of nineteenth-century Spain introduced the concept of decency to the representation of the female nude. During the Restoration, there was a proliferation of images of women obliged for financial reasons to pose nude for artists, who in return deliberately concealed their faces to preserve their dignity. In this work, the model hide their nudity with dramatic gesture. The dejection is heightened by the presence of an older woman of humble origins, who seems to remind her of her deprived situation. The painter gives the fabrics covering the model a treatment comparable to that of her body, an apparently ironic comment on the fact that both cloths and nudes were regarded as objects in the academic training of artists.