After establishing himself as a successful painter in Australia, E Phillips Fox moved to England at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1905, he married English artist Ethel Carrick and the couple settled in Paris, living at 65 Boulevard Arago in Montparnasse. He began to exhibit at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1906, where Resting c.1910–11 was likely shown.  

Fox began painting nudes in 1909, with some set in the garden of his and Carrick’s Parisan apartment, and others set indoors. This example is one of the finest of Fox’s nudes in an interior setting, and also one of his least conventional, with its shadowed half-light and the figure’s languid pose.