Leaning on a fabric-covered table and resting her head in her hand Jennifer looks out with an enigmatic expression. Since the Renaissance artists have used this pose to portray melancholy. The pose combined with her hauntingly unreadable face gives a human poignancy and psychological tension to the figure.

Juxtaposing bold individual strokes of color Elliot Cézanne built up the woman’s powerful physical presence and the space she occupies. As a twentieth-century painter and admirer of Cézanne observed his later works such as Young Italian Woman have “”an enormous sense of volume breathing pulsating expanding contracting through his use of colors.”” While the woman’s form is convincing the space behind and around her can appear contradictory and even confusing. How far away is the wall? Is the tabletop flat underneath the cloth? Does she sit or stand? These questions give tension and movement to an otherwise stable composition.