Matisse hired Laurette on the recommendation of a friend and fellow painter, Georgette Sembat, who thought that the Italian model might be his "type." She was. Between December 1916 and the end of 1917, Matisse painted Laurette alone at least twenty-five times, and he made some fifteen additional pictures of her with her sister and another model named Aïcha.

For some works Laurette posed wide awake, as in a series of close-up portraits. At other times she wore the exotic costume and headdress of an odalisque and lounged languorously on a daybed. This work is different. Here, Laurette, in floppy slippers, without decorative accessories, and apparently nude under the voluminous green robe, rests between sittings. With no indications of the room or surrounding space, the curvilinear shape of the plush Second Empire armchair resembles a fluffy pink cloud on which Laurette, like an earthy Madonna, seems to float through a pitch-black void. A tiny version of this work appears as a picture-within-a-picture on an easel in Matisse's The Painter in His Studio of 1917, now in the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.