The big altar boy

In 1925 Soutine was working in the countryside at Le Blanc, in the Indre, on a property belonging to his dealer Léopold Zborowski. This choirboy was the first of a theme he kept returning to until 1927. Part of the idea came from the old masters he had studied in the Paris museums, above all the choirboy standing at the front of Courbet's A Burial at Ornans. Soutine keeps only the red and white of the vestments and lets the brushwork tremble. The boy is stretched tall and seems to float against the dark blue ground, a strain the Centre Pompidou compares to El Greco. This was the first painting in the Soutine collection of Madeleine and Marcellin Castaing, who often had him to stay at their house at Lèves, just outside Chartres. In 1995 it passed to the French state and was placed on deposit here, a few kilometres from that house.