Seated Femal Nude was produced a couple of months after Picasso completed Woman with a Crow. Like the former, it seems to stand at the margins between his Blue Period and his Rose Period.

The work is largely unfinished, although it has been signed in the lower right. Picasso has mostly completed the background, again a solid bluish-green tone, to form a starkly contrasting backdrop to the frail form of the naked female model, Picasso has also given detail to both face and right hand, but has left the remainder of the body only lightly sketched in. The pinkish-ochre ground upon which Picasso has painted the work shines through the figure, even where the body has been built up with subsequent layers of oil paint. This certainly suggests the brighter palette that Picasso soon adopted for his 'rose-period' works. The model for this work was probably a woman known only as Madeleine, with whom Picasso had an affair in 1904, Her frail, emaciated, and somewhat androgynous appearance seems to have inspired Picasso's melancholic paintings of this period, in many of which she appears,