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Lot Essay
This painting will be included in the revised and supplemented edition of the Soutine catalogue raisonné currently being prepared by Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow.
When Soutine began to focus on painting the human figure towards the end of the Great War, he chose his subjects carefully. Instead of depicting members of the fashionable bourgeois class as so many of his predecessors had done, Soutine chose to celebrate the working class. Thus grooms, valets, cooks and servants quickly become the protagonists of Soutine's painterly world, all dressed in tightly buttoned uniforms, staring blankly at the viewer. Painted in the immediate foreground, invading our space, these men and women become modern icons of the struggling working class.
By the mid-1930s, however, Soutine was painting fewer uniformed figures, choosing instead less identifiable figures in more everyday clothing. Still largely from the working classes, they appear less imposing than the portraits of the 1920s, no longer completely self-contained, while displaying a greater interaction with their environment and the objects around them. Soutine's figures therefore become less dominant of the canvas, more passive and restrained. La femme à l'ombrelle is one such example; still painted with a characteristic expressionistic and agitated application of paint, the sitter appears calm and introspective, not even facing the viewer as she sits under her umbrella.
When Soutine began to focus on painting the human figure towards the end of the Great War, he chose his subjects carefully. Instead of depicting members of the fashionable bourgeois class as so many of his predecessors had done, Soutine chose to celebrate the working class. Thus grooms, valets, cooks and servants quickly become the protagonists of Soutine's painterly world, all dressed in tightly buttoned uniforms, staring blankly at the viewer. Painted in the immediate foreground, invading our space, these men and women become modern icons of the struggling working class.
By the mid-1930s, however, Soutine was painting fewer uniformed figures, choosing instead less identifiable figures in more everyday clothing. Still largely from the working classes, they appear less imposing than the portraits of the 1920s, no longer completely self-contained, while displaying a greater interaction with their environment and the objects around them. Soutine's figures therefore become less dominant of the canvas, more passive and restrained. La femme à l'ombrelle is one such example; still painted with a characteristic expressionistic and agitated application of paint, the sitter appears calm and introspective, not even facing the viewer as she sits under her umbrella.