Mademoiselle Sicot

Beyond her name, the museum's record says only one thing about Mademoiselle Sicot. She ordered this portrait herself, in 1865, from a painter of 24. What can be followed is the canvas. It later passed as a gift to Aline Ménard-Dorian, a Paris hostess whose daughter married Victor Hugo's grandson, which is why she is sometimes wrongly called Hugo's second wife. When Madame Ménard-Dorian died in 1929, her pictures were sold at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris on 2 December, five weeks after the Wall Street crash. Within a year this one was in New York, bought by Chester Dale, a financier who went on buying French paintings through the Depression, and in December 1930 The New York Times ran the purchase under the headline "Buy Renoir Canvas Here." The date is still on the canvas at the right, painted along the edge of her skirt, A. Renoir, 1865.