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This painting, The Little Milkmaid, also called Young Woman in a Shirt, the model is shown three-quarter length and in both canvases we find a curious ambivalence, sensuality at odds with modesty, passion with decorum, desire with a shrinking from desire. In these works the female body has something of the quality of those early morning landscapes that emerge from mist at daybreak. On the other hand, owing both to the horizontal format and their compositional rhythms, the reclining nudes produce a very different impression, one of shameless abandon, of ardent, untrammelled passion. These might be described as "night-pieces," whereas the others are "morning-pieces.".