#biblical

From what I can find, this was painted while he was still wanted for killing a man years earlier, waiting on a pardon that never came in time — some people who write about this see Peter's denial as an odd echo of his own situation, though that's speculation, not something he ever said himself.

The gallery paid a record price for this in 1980, and from what I've read people have argued ever since about whether it's really his at all — the museum says yes, the doubters have never let it go.

He moved to Paris partly to get away from how Black artists got treated back home, and this moody, almost colorless lighting became the thing he was known for there.

For years this was shown under a different biblical woman's name — people kept taking it for Salome — and that's supposedly why the right name ended up hammered into the metal at the top. A goldsmith brother of his made that frame, from what I can find, so the frame and the painting were meant to arrive as one object.