This work comes from a private collection and depicts a young woman sensually smoking a cigarette, heightening the idea of uninhibited, free femininity by the voluptuousness of the pose. The subject is not new, it dates from the late 19th century, and is influenced by the unconventional iconography introduced by the Scapigliatura movement, to be found for instance in The Reader by Federico Faruffini (1864, Milan, Galleria d'Arte Moderna [1]) or the literary theme of The Opium Smokers by Gaetano Previati (1887, Piacenza, Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi [2]). The female figure is central to the genre painting of the Neapolitan Irolli who depicts it sometimes in a spiritual religious key as in The Angel Musician in the Collection, and sometimes in a sensual key. He painted the latter subject until the 1930s, probably looking to the models that became established through photography and the cinema. In the work in the Collection female sensuality is expressed through a composition that focuses on the figure of the model and on a play of strong blues and reds, in the dress and background respectively. The pictorial quality is enriched by immediate gestures like the pure white applied directly from the tube to the canvas along the neckline of the dress. What results is an image of a provocative and ironical woman, painted with a sensitivity that Irolli shares with Vincenzo Caprile and Giuseppe Migliaro, who, like him, trained in the Neapolitan milieu and were candid interpreters of the life of the common people, according to a new approach that characterised not only painting but also Realist literature.