This painting is a fragment of a bigger three-quarter length portrait of Gillies’ sisters. Gillies painted it (and then cut it down), after returning from France where he encountered cubism. We can see the influence in the shaping of the heads and the simplified surface planes. The sisters are beautified with a feel of religious works of the early Italian Renaissance.
After seeing works by Edvard Munch at the SSA in 1931, Gillies never again gave his sisters a shared beauty, or painted members of his family in an affectionate relationship. He would instead reveal more honest and difficult truths.