Portrait of Sonia Lewitzka

The title names the sitter, and she was a painter too. Sonia Lewitska grew up in a village in what is now Ukraine, came to Paris in 1905, studied with the painter Jean Marchand and later married him. She worked through cubism and fauvist colour before settling into something quieter, and made her name illustrating books issued in small editions. By 1932 she had been showing for years at the Paris salons, the Indépendants, the Automne, the Tuileries. Bernard was 64 when he painted her. She died five years later, in 1937, and friends who wanted her work kept in circulation founded a society in her name and put on two exhibitions of it in 1938.