#french

The woman in the chair was a pianist who ran with a crowd of painters, writers and musicians. Apparently he painted her many times and the two stayed close friends for years, even after her marriage ended.

The woman reading is Madame Hessel — according to what I've read, she was his art dealer's wife and one of his closest friends, and he painted her over and over for something like forty years. This is her on holiday at a house by the Normandy coast.

It's the old Greek story — a princess chained to a rock as an offering to a sea monster, waiting on a rescue that's supposedly on its way. They say the painter spent twenty-odd years working in nothing but charcoal black before he let colour in at all.

I couldn't find much on this one at all. From what I've read he's mostly remembered for cubism, and this seems to come from before any of that — a small early thing that survived. If anyone knows more, I'd love the story.

According to Wikipedia he never left France — the jungles came out of Paris greenhouses and picture books, and this one's from the last year of his life. People laughed at him for decades, then decided he was a genius roughly the minute he was gone.