The Artist's Grandmother

The sitter is Bernard's grandmother on his mother's side, painted in 1887 at Asnières, just outside Paris, when he was 19. She sits turned three-quarters away from us in a maroon dress, set hard against the green of her chair, and Bernard wrote his name and the year at the upper right. He painted her more than once that year, and each version has gone its own way. This one probably passed after his death to his son-in-law, Clément Altarriba, who lent it to an exhibition on Eugène Carrière and Symbolism at the Orangerie in Paris in the winter of 1949. In November 1959 it came up at Sotheby's in London, listed only as the property of a gentleman, and the museum has never been able to establish whether that gentleman was Altarriba. A New York gallery bought it at the sale, and in 1961 the Museum of Fine Arts paid 7,500 dollars for it.