Portrait de Madame Sans

Henri Martin was born in Toulouse, and in 1895 he painted a woman of that city in a canvas two metres high. Madame Sans kept a salon open to the local artists, and Martin began the portrait knowing she was incurably ill. She died that same year. He was working in the symbolist manner then, in small separated touches of colour, and he set thistles beside her, which the museum reads as a sign of his own distress rather than hers. The picture stayed in private hands for most of a century. In 1981 it was given to the city of Toulouse and went into the Musee des Augustins, the medieval convent that has held the city's paintings since the French Revolution.