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Oil on cardboard. Signed lower left: “Drtikol/ 1943”. When František Drtikol sold his studio on Prague's Vodičkova Street in 1935, he was 52 years old. At the time he said he had put an end to his photography career and was returning to his love – painting. The topics of his paintings were landscapes, symbolic compositions that built on his photographs of nudes, and still lifes with floral motifs; in some cases the paintings approached abstraction. The painting of a young woman getting ready to go swimming in a lake also carries symbolic meaning and recalls the moving female figures from the artist's photographic oeuvre. He earned acclaim for his early photographs of female nudes, demonstrating a special sense for poetry and harmony influenced by Art Deco and the avant-garde. He characterized them by explaining, “I let myself be inspired by three things in my work: decoration, movement and rest, and the expression of individual lines.”