Additional Images

Provenance:

With Chenue S.A.R.L, Paris shipping label verso;
Eaton's (Canada) inscribed to the frame verso;
Private Collection, Toronto

Note:

Painter, printmaker and stage designer, Marie Laurencin was a central figure in the Parisian avant-garde. Often associated with Cubism, Laurencin resisted dominant artistic movements, preferring to focus her gaze on dreamy portraits of elegant, peaceful women and animals.

Laurencin studied porcelain painting in Sèvres before enrolling at the Humbert Academy in Paris. Studying there from 1903-1904, she painted alongside Georges Braque. Laurencin would meet Picasso in 1907, becoming embedded in the inner circles of the Cubists of Montmartre. Picasso would introduce her to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, with whom she became romantically involved until 1912. Laurencin also became close with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the former who was among her first patrons. Other avant-garde connections involved the Section d’Or, a collective based in the suburbs of Paris. The group of artists, writers and critics met at the home of the Duchamp brothers in Puteaux and at Albert Gleizes’ atelier in Courbevoie. The Section d’Or was best known for their exhibition at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants–which Laurencin participated in on Apollinaire’s urging–alongside Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Robert Delaunay, Henri le Fauconnier, and Fernand Léger. In 1913, Laurencin contributed an image to the seminal Armory Show, cementing her international reputation.

The 1920s were Laurencin’s heyday, and she was commissioned to paint portraits of Coco Chanel, Jean Cocteau and Lady Cunard. Dorothy Todd, editor of Vogue, declared in 1928 that “since…Berthe Morisot, no woman painter has earned the world-wide endorsement of art connoisseurs to so great an extent as Marie Laurencin. Her pictures hang in almost every national gallery and no private collection is considered complete without one.”

Along with her own artistic practice, Laurencin would illustrate several books, including an edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in 1930, as well as designing sets for the Ballets Russes in 1925 and the Comédie Française in 1928. Avid wine collectors should note that she produced one of the famous labels for Château Mouton Rothschild in 1948.