Portrait of the Painter Émilie Charmy

In 1908 Émilie Charmy was 30. She had come to Paris from Saint-Étienne a few years earlier and was making her name with boldly coloured flowers and still lifes. The dealer Berthe Weill, whose small gallery championed the young Fauves, had noticed her at the Salon d'Automne of 1905 and promoted her from then on, and the writer Roland Dorgelès once said of her that she saw like a woman and painted like a man. Pierre Girieud, who had also shown with Weill, painted her that year on a large sheet of cardboard, about a metre high. The museum's title calls her what she was, the painter Émilie Charmy. The heavy dark contours around the bright colour were Girieud's manner in these years, and he signed and dated the picture at the right.