Dato Hoessein Enas rarely used the titillating word, nude, except maybe in this one. Still, he practised discretion when painting women in provocative poses, unlike his Indonesian mentor Basuki Abdullah (1915-1993). There were two nude drawing, both dated from 1954, which were shown in a dedicated exhibition at Ilham Gallery in Kuala Lumpur in December 2015, but they were fairly tame. In this work, the subject is shown half-naked but when it comes to the crucial part, it is camouflaged with a cotton-wool mist of white and by the long black tresses streaking down her left shoulder. The woman, with well-penciled eyebrows, looks away in a flush of modesty, and it is her melancholy beady eyes that rivets the viewer’s attention rather than to look for signs of immodesty. Indeed, Hoessein had done more racy works like Memory – 24 Years and Now (1990), Oh, Yes (1986), Never More (1992) and of course, his Morning Mist series of bathers, of which No. 4 (1991-1992) still holds his auction record of RM198,000, set in the Henry Butcher auction in 2011. Indonesian-born Hoessein Enas led a chequered life, braving the rough seas to escape from the Dutch in December 1947 from Java to Singapore, where he briefly worked as a rickshaw-rider before moving to Penang and finally to Selangor. He formed the Angkatan Pelukis Semenanjung (later SeMalaysia), based on a similar society he helped form in Indonesia. He was granted Malaysian citizenship in 1956. The then Sultan of Selangor made him a ‘royal’ portrait painter in May 1990 and awarded him the ‘Dato’ title in March 1991. He is also well remembered for his Shell commissioned paintings of 56 called The Malaysians in 1956. The National Art Gallery accorded him a Retrospective in 1966. His awards include fellowships from Unesco (1960) and the United States (1968), an Asia Foundation grant (1960) and the Colombo Plan (1968).