La fille aux yeux verts

Matisse painted this in 1908, and it left his studio almost before it was dry. Harriet Lane Levy, a San Franciscan living in Paris in the circle around Gertrude Stein, bought it straight from him, still wet and unsigned. It reached the Bay Area in 1911, five years after the earthquake and fire, and the San Francisco Examiner ran a reproduction under the line, Matisse paints faces crazed by absinthe drinking. Levy's own comment was that the picture was getting sufficient advertisement. Who the model was has never been established. Matisse gave the pottery and the small sculpture on the shelf behind her the same weight as her face, so the background keeps pushing forward instead of staying back. Levy left the painting to the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1950, when that museum was 15 years old.