Portrait of Hermine David in the Studio

By 1919 Pascin had spent the war years in America, far from the Paris cafes, and the woman in this studio had crossed the Atlantic to be with him. Hermine David was a painter in her own right, a miniaturist and printmaker who had built a reputation before the two of them ever met in 1907. They married at a New York city hall the year before this was made. So it is a painter looking at a painter: he sets her among the clutter of a workspace, in that nervous, feathery line of his that never tidies a face up. The following year they sailed back to France together. David went on to her own long career in book illustration, and in 1932 France made her a chevalier of the Legion of Honour.