Portrait of Madame Paul Guillaume in a Large Hat

At the end of the 1920s a fashionable Parisian woman wore a wide, soft-brimmed hat and painted her lips a lacquered red. That is how Derain shows Juliette Guillaume, nicknamed Domenica, the wife of his dealer Paul Guillaume, in this portrait from 1928 or 1929. She sits as a woman of society, a luxurious cream stole around her shoulders, her hands crossed, a faint smile on her face. The colours are held to beiges and ochres, and a length of carmine cloth behind her gives the picture depth. About ten years earlier Derain had painted Paul Guillaume himself. Here, sketched in at the right edge, is another of his pictures, Harlequin and Pierrot, the large canvas Guillaume had commissioned from him. The couple kept this portrait in a place of honour in their bedroom, in their private house in Paris.