This enigmatic work is the earliest piece in the Estorick Collection and was possibly made in Paris. It exemplifies Rosso’s unconventional approach to sculpture in the way that the space around the figure is rendered as tangible as the figure itself. This also characterised the imagery of the Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni, who admired the energy and spontaneity of Rosso’s technique. In the 1912 ‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture’, Boccioni observed how ‘the sensitive touch of [his] thumb, imitating the lightness of Impressionist brushwork, gives a sense of vibrant immediacy to his works’.