Little Girl in Red Dress

The girl is Jozefa Oderfeld and the picture was a commission. Her father, Adam Maksymilian Oderfeld, collected Polish painting and ordered a full-length portrait of her, which is now in Kielce. This shoulder-length version came out of the same year, 1897, when Pankiewicz was working on soft light and dissolved contours, no hard edges anywhere, the whole face carried by the eyes. Five years later the canvas was bought by Feliks Jasienski, the collector who did more than anyone to bring Japanese prints into Polish artistic circles and who backed young Polish painters when few others would. In 1920 he handed his entire collection, some 15,000 objects, to the National Museum in Krakow, and the girl in the red dress went with it.