Self-portrait by Chaïm Soutine

Around 1918 Soutine was in his mid-twenties, poor, and one of a small group of young painters kept going by the Paris dealer Léopold Zborowski. Much of the money behind Zborowski came from Jonas Netter, a Jewish businessman from Alsace, who bought through him and in the end owned more than 100 works by Soutine. This self-portrait was one of them. Most painters show themselves glancing sideways into a mirror. Soutine looks straight out, in a jacket and tie, and at the left edge a canvas stands on the easel with a second face painted on it. Among his few self-portraits, the Princeton University Art Museum notes, this is the only one in which he shows himself before an easel. Netter held on to it through the German occupation of Paris, which he got through almost in hiding, on false papers. He died in 1946, and three years later his widow sold the picture to the American collector Henry Pearlman.