Frau beim Kämmen

By 1897 Wladyslaw Slewinski had spent a decade in France, a Polish landowner who had lost his estate and drifted to Paris, where he fell in with Paul Gauguin and the painters around him in Brittany. This picture carries their lesson plainly. A woman at her toilette is flattened into a few bold shapes, her copper hair spilling forward over her face as she combs it, the whole scene built from broad areas of colour rather than modelled light. Gauguin had by then sailed for Tahiti, and Slewinski was carrying that Pont-Aven manner back toward Poland, where the Young Poland movement would claim him. We do not know the sitter for certain; it may be Eugenia Szewcowa, the Russian painter he later married.