This delicate yet powerfully expressive drawing, typical of Alberto Giacometti’s portraits of his close friends and family, depicts his wife Annette seated nude in his studio. Meeting in Geneva in 1942, they would live together on rue Hippolyte-Maindron in Paris from 1946 until the end of the artist’s life. In quantity, the sculptures, paintings and drawings which depict Annette are comparable only to those of Alberto’s brother Diego. Here, as in his other drawings, Giacometti’s draughtsmanship retains not only a strongly expressive and affective quality, but also exhibits an intimacy and deftness of touch that is perhaps not so clearly rendered in oil or bronze.

In the majority of his works, whether drawings, paintings or sculpture, Giacometti’s approach was consistent: the model is frontally posed and deprived of all attributes that might convey information about personality or social status. In the present work, the artist depicts the seated Annette through closely drawn, staccato and sketch-like lines. Against a sparsely-drawn background consisting of a network of vertical and horizontal lines, anatomical details emerge where pencil marks converge to form the curved outlines of shoulders, breasts and knees. There is a distinct fragility to the human form brought out by the medium, its stretched, over-elongated structure and the precarious tilt of the pose; edging towards a kind of abstraction, this figure expresses the artist’s uncompromising interest in the psychological drama of the human condition.

The setting of the artist’s Paris studio seen in this work forms a kind of framing device which opens up a three-dimensional space. This can be found in many of Giacometti's works of the period. By isolating the figure in a remote and uncertain environment, Giacometti marks off the figure's space as distinct from our reality. When asked why he used these framing outlines, he replied:

Characteristically, in the present drawing, the model engages the viewer directly and holds the viewer's gaze. The elusiveness of the facial structure, however, where there is only an intimation of wide, circular eyes, bears a conceptual and emotive relationship to many of Francis Bacon’s portraits. The artists were aware of and admired each other’s work for many years before they finally met in the early 1960s in a Paris café. Only Giacometti’s death in 1966 forestalled what might otherwise have been a productive and long-lasting relationship. For both artists, “life had a quality of extreme shrillness, combining violence with fragility” (Catherine Grenier, “Violence and Compulsion”, in Bacon Giacometti, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2018, p. 19). Similarly, there are clear links with the younger artist Frank Auerbach in the complex overlapping and concatenation of lines which reflect an image recovered and reconceived – “an unpremeditated manifestation arising from the constant application of true draughtsmanship” (Leon Kossoff in Frank Auerbach, exhibition catalogue, Arts Council, Hayward Gallery, London, 1978, p. 9).