Portrait of Renée Kisling

Renée Gros married Moïse Kisling in Paris in 1917, and she became one of the faces he returned to again and again. This is her. By the early 1920s Kisling was among the most sought-after portrait painters in Montparnasse, the artists' quarter on the Left Bank where he lived and worked, and everything that made his name is in this picture: the smooth, almost enamelled surface, the clean bright colour, and the large dark almond-shaped eyes he gave nearly everyone who sat for him. Well-off visitors climbed to his studio to be painted in exactly this style. Renée sat for free. In those years the couple's home was one of the open houses of the quarter, where the district's often-penniless painters gathered.