Sitting Young Woman

This is an early oil, and for Pascin in 1912 that already says something. He had reached Paris a few years earlier with a reputation built entirely on his drawings, the quick line of a published draughtsman, and he was still working out how to be a painter. You can see it in the support. He worked on a piece of cardboard, the cheap and portable surface of a man making a study rather than a picture for sale. The sitter is one of the anonymous young women who fill his work, caught in an ordinary seated pose, half at rest. That same summer he filled a sketchbook with beach scenes at Ostend on the Belgian coast, so a worked-up oil like this one is a relatively rare thing from his hand that year.