Painted in 1969, Nude Woman is an exceptionally rare and charged image within Ephraim Ngatane’s oeuvre, where township streets and Black domestic life are the dominant subjects. Here the artist turns instead to the white female nude at a time when the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Acts made sexual relationships between “Europeans” and “non-Europeans” a jailable offence, with penalties of up to five years in prison for interracial sex outside marriage. According to oral histories attached to this work, the painting grew out of a clandestine affair between Ngatane and a white woman; while standard biographies and catalogues record neither the liaison nor the sitter’s name, they underscore how unusual such a subject is in his short career. The picture’s evident awkwardness – the uncertain anatomy, the thick, dragged paint – can be read less as technical limitation than as a register of risk: a body painted almost furtively, as if the very act of looking and recording were already transgressive. In the same year Ngatane produced Homage to Jean Welz, a figural interior nude explicitly acknowledging his admiration for the émigré modernist, whose South African nudes likely provided a formal template for this experiment. Seen from today, Nude Woman is not simply an erotic study but the painted trace of a forbidden intimacy, an image that quietly refuses apartheid’s racial boundaries by insisting on desire, vulnerability, and mutual recognition across a line the law worked obsessively to police.