Reclining Nude

Bailey is a figurative painter and draftsman best known for serene images of groups of vessels on a tabletop. Following army service, he worked briefly as a technical draftsman for a steel company. He later studied art with Josef Albers at Yale University and eventually joined the faculty there. This delicately drawn image of a reclining female nude was made from a model, though he rarely used models for his paintings. "Drawing is very important to me," he once told an interviewer, because "it challenges me in a way that nothing else does. Drawing is putting together, forming something with minimal means."