Woman Walking Away.

Woman Walking Away shows Myriam (in her sister Magdalena’s dress) in the garden of ‘Death House’, Lenkiewicz’s cottage in Compton, watched by a male figure whose entrails flail after the retreating woman. The male figure is taken directly from Velàzquez’s The Forge of Vulcan; even the twisting entrails exactly follow a sinuous line in Velàzquez’s own composition. Vulcan is the Roman counterpart to the smithy god Hephaestus who in Greek mythology made the first woman, Pandora, out of clay.