Toss Woollaston is widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s most important modernist painters. Born in Taranaki in 1910, he moved to Christchurch to study at the Canterbury School of Art in 1931. Unhappy with the conservative artmaking methods of the school, he relocated to Dunedin the following year to study under R.N. Field. There, study was focussed on modernist practices, which were still emergent at the time. Subsequently, he settled permanently in the South Island, first in Mapua, and later in Greymouth. He became particularly well known for his highly expressive West Coast paintings and remained active as an artist into his 80s. To this day, his work remains among the nation’s most notable and prized.

Though Woollaston is best known for his landscapes, figurative paintings were central to his development as an artist and a consistent thread throughout his oeuvre. Writer and curator Luit Bieringa discussed the role of figuration in Woollaston’s work, stating that historically, “Figure and portrait painting, like still-life painting, has never been much to the forefront in the studies of New Zealand painting. The reasons for this are quite obvious considering the ubiquitous presence of the landscape and its apparent accessibility as a subject…in the case of the painters of the new generation like Woollaston, McCahon and the late Rita Angus, portraiture and figure studies formed a major part of their oeuvre.”

In the earlier stages of his career, the artist juggled his artmaking around full-time employment, painting at night and during weekends. He produced many portraits and figure studies, mostly of his family and friends. Bieringa wrote, “This expediency laid the foundations to one of the major aspects of Wollaston's oeuvre, often forgotten, that he is one of New Zealand's most successful painters of people. His development as a portrait painter over the years has been synonymous with his portrayal of the localities he has depicted. Indeed in 1961 he said with reference to his portraits 'They are not portraits but extensions of the landscape into human shape'.”
Yellow Nude is a later work, painted in the early 1970s. It was sold by Peter McLeavey in 1972 and has remained with the same collector until today. The painting depicts a striking figure set in a landscape environment with sharply contrasting tones between figure and ground. The paint handling is distinctively Woollaston’s, with energetic application and significant areas left raw, particularly in the background. Bieringa stated that some of the best features of the artist’s figurative works were his use of “unpainted areas, parallel strokes of dulled yet glowing colours and broad, broken charcoal lines - all joining forces to create a series of dynamic planes.”

An interpretive framework for Yellow Nude could be a metaphorical relationship between the figure and the landscape – a depiction of the environment and ecology in human form. The artist was deeply interested in the natural world – both in its fragility and rich beauty, qualities Yellow Nude gracefully conveys. The palette of the painting is in an earthy configuration unique to Woollaston. The artist himself stated, “Writers on my work are fond of quoting me as having said many years ago, that I wanted to paint the light, but only after it had been absorbed into the earth. It is true. Therefore, yellow ochre is my only yellow. I don't need any brighter. I find the most exciting exercise is to set it next to another colour (or other colours) so that it glows and looks brighter than people would have supposed it could.” In Yellow Nude, the ochre of the figure is surprisingly rich and luminous, as if Woollaston had written those words of this very work.