The painting was painted in 1925 on canvas using oils. It is currently housed in the Museo Nacional – Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. The dimensions of the painting are 103 cm * 73.5 cm.

This portrait of Salvador Dali’s sister made a very strong impression at the artist’s first solo exhibition in 1925 at the Dalmau Gallery in Barcelona, ​​which Picasso also visited. The harsh image and cool color scheme convey the spirit of Dali’s statement. The painting attracted Picasso’s attention. Picasso immediately noticed the young woman seen from the back and also highly appreciated it. The artist was attracted by the combination of virtuoso drawing with a modern understanding of composition, which provides for a generous plastic sonority of all elements.

Anna Maria was the main character in Salvador Dali’s works during this period of his work. One could compile a large gallery of female portraits depicting the artist’s sister – these are portraits imbued with concentration, filled with melancholy, always striking in the purity of the drawing.

Among all the works that were created between 1924 and 1926, there are several that form something like a dense core, the center of all the artist’s subsequent work. In addition to the painting we have described, these include Portrait of a Girl against a Landscape, Meditation, Female Figure at a Window, Back of a Girl, Portrait of Maria Carbona, Nude. The style in these paintings is refined, varying the motif of a lonely female figure, which turns out to be both the compositional and semantic center of the entire painting.

This “female universe”, reproduced so many times, but not repeating itself, is transparent and dark at the same time. If you look closely at the named series of the artist’s paintings, after the first feeling of enchantment with the perfection of the drawing has passed, you will get an impression similar to an obsession, perhaps not a “graphic mania” in the way Salvador Dali paints the hair of his characters.

The colors become cold, increasingly fade, the blue tones spread, and the gray ones become glassy or turn into pieces of ice. The figure of a young woman sitting on a wooden chair with her back turned to us is also emphasized as distant and pale. Salvador Dali begins to aggressively attack this motif of the human figure, the city and existence, which must be approached from behind and a certain secret must be captured.