Portrait of Madame Henri Martin

By 1910 Henri Martin was spending a good part of every year on scaffolding. The French state kept handing him walls, the Salle des Pas Perdus in the Capitole at Toulouse, a ceiling at the Sorbonne, rooms at the Hotel de Ville in Paris, all of it allegory at the size of a building. The rest of the year he was at Marquayrol, the house he had bought in 1900 in the hills west of Cahors. The sitter is his wife, Marie-Charlotte Barbaroux, a pastel painter herself. They met as students at the art school in Toulouse and married in 1881, and she and their sons are the figures who keep reappearing in the garden pictures made at that house. He painted her in the same small separated touches he had taken from the neo-impressionists around 1890 and never gave up. The museum in Cahors that owns this portrait carries his name.