Madame Georges Bizet

The inscription across the top reads 'To Madame G. Bizet', and Delaunay signed and dated the portrait on the top of the chair, Paris 1878. Geneviève Halévy, daughter of the composer Fromental Halévy, had married Georges Bizet in 1869. In March 1875 his opera Carmen opened at the Opéra-Comique to a mixed reception, and three months later he was dead at 36, leaving her a widow at 26. Three years on, she still sits in black, a mourning veil tied at her throat, in a tall gilded chair topped with carved shells. The portrait was shown at the Salon of 1878. In 1886 she married the lawyer Émile Straus, and after her death in 1926 the picture entered the national collections.