Girl with Mandolin

In September 1916, with the battle of Verdun still going on, the Spanish painter Juan Gris painted this young woman again in Paris, broken into flat planes of grey, white and brown. Braque and Léger, his fellow Cubists, had been sent to the front. Gris, a citizen of neutral Spain, stayed in his studio, and that year he began working from the old masters, Corot among them. His version, now in the Kunstmuseum Basel, keeps the details you can find here: the band of beads across her hair, the small pearl earring, the mandolin lying across her knees. Corot had painted her in the first half of the 1860s, a studio model in Italian peasant dress idly plucking the strings. By 1916 the canvas was nowhere near Paris. The dealers Bernheim-Jeune had sold it in 1911 to Baron Mór Lipót Herzog, a banker and collector in Budapest, and it was still in his collection when Gris made his copy.