Portrait of Jean-Paul Laurens

In February 1919, three months after the armistice, Jean-Paul Laurens was raised to grand officer of the Legion of Honour. He was 80, a history painter known for his scenes of the death of Saint Genevieve in the Panthéon, and a long-time teacher at the Académie Julian, the private art school Beaury-Saurel directed. That year she showed this portrait at the joint exhibition the two rival Paris Salon societies held in 1919, and the state bought it from her. She seats him in a carved chair, in a loose red smock and a black cap, spectacles on, a palette in one hand and brushes in the other, with pale sketched figures drifting behind him. In 1920 the canvas went to the Luxembourg, the state's museum of living artists. Laurens died the following March.