Le bar des matelots

The first recorded owner of the present work, the eccentric Parisian dentist Dr. Maurice Girardin became the artist's most important patron following their meeting in the early 1920s. Upon Dr. Girardin's death in 1953, the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris received seventy eight of the artist's paintings. Later owner Frank Crowninshield, the long-serving first editor of Vanity Fair, was another of the artist's celebrated admirers. Hired by friend Condé Nast in 1914 to serve as editor-in-chief, Crowninshield soon attracted and published writers Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker and was among the first in America to reproduce works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Founding trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and champion of the artists Charles Despiau, Marie Laurencin and André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Crowninshield also collected widely. The present painting featured in the sale of his impressive avant-garde collection shortly before his death in 1947.