The woman in the armchair is a recent new acquisition of the Capuchin Museum together with the works in permanent storage of the Rusconi collection.

The painting is part of one of the numerous examples of this subject painted by Umberto Boccioni in the years in which his inspiring muses were the important women of his life: his mother Cecilia, his sister Raffaella Amalia, his cousin Adriana Bisi Fabbri and Ines, the beloved woman.

The work is part of the first production of the artist who, having arrived in Milan in 1907, came into contact with various artists, and who in 1909 felt the desire to get closer to those more avant-garde and experimental figures. In fact, he wanted to meet those who had already joined the newborn Futurist Movement, of which he himself would later be part. Among these was the poet Luciano Folgore whom Boccioni wanted to pay homage by sending him his own work, on the back of which, instead of writing a dedication and sending it with an accompanying note, he quickly drew a portrait in the form of a caricature of Folgore himself.

The work comes from the property of Luciano Folgore's family and, in the upper part of the back on which Boccioni drew the caricature, the painter's widow, Valentina Folgore, described the curious story: "I, the undersigned Valentina Folgore, declare that the oil painting on the back of this cartoon where the caricature of Luciano Folgore is drawn in watercolor is done by Boccioni, it belonged to Luciano Folgore who had received it as a gift from Boccioni himself. Valentina Folgore ".

In the realization of the woman in an armchair Boccioni already poses himself as an experimenter of light and movement, in painting a figure in which some features are indefinite (the expression and physiognomy of the face) perhaps a memory and recovery of past impressionist characters, while with a extreme clarity deals with the plastic and quick pose of crossing the legs.