Portrait of a Woman with a Book

Bernard painted portraits for more than fifty years, and most of them went straight into private collections, which is why so few hang where anyone can see them. A great many of his sitters were models whose names nobody wrote down, and the woman holding the book is one of those. He made this one in 1931, at 63, on cardboard rather than canvas, 69 by 53 centimetres. He was working then from the old house at 15 quai de Bourbon on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, where he had lived since 1926 and where he died in 1941. Writers on his portraits point to how little he uses to build a face, and to the light, which is always carefully placed.