The art critic Robert L. Pincus singled out this picture (together with a second painting of Fidelma in

Artforum after seeing Kossoff’s solo exhibition at L.A. Louver, Los Angeles, in 1984:

"Ultimately, he achieves a great measure of control over the effects of his paintings; they strike a delicate and resonant balance between gesture and structure, feeling and intellect, historical knowledge and original vision. If naturalistic visual fact dissipates in, say, Fidelma 1981, or Fidelma Lying on the Bed, 1984, what takes its place is an intriguingly unstable image of the female figure. The fluid contour of her body appears to merge with the ground, leaving the lighter tones of her flesh floating

in pictorial space, yet an underlying structure is always present in Kossoff’s use of traditional poses. It is the push and pull of the historicist and the (late) Modernist in him that animates his painting, giving it authentic

power and visual eloquence …" (Pincus 1985, p. 101)