Portrait of a Woman

In 1925 Bernard put four very large canvases in front of the Paris public, a group he called The Human Cycle, worked out in Venice, where the Biennale had given him a room of his own in 1922. The first version went up that year at the Salon des Tuileries. This portrait carries the same date, and it was made on a piece of cardboard, 80 centimetres high. The museum's record gives no name for the sitter. The four Cycle canvases stayed in Italy and are kept at the Ca' Pesaro in Venice, while the portrait went into a Swedish private collection and reached Amsterdam as a gift.