Girl Under a Tree is a rare example of Heward depicting a white female nude. It was also a personal favourite of the artist’s—the only one of her own paintings she hung in her bedroom.

The woman in the painting seems out of place because she is not lying next to a body of water as though she has been swimming, and the light in the painting indicates that she is not naked for the purposes of sunbathing. Nevertheless, artist Arthur Lismer (1885–1969) thought it was “the best nude ever painted in Canada.”