The floor waiter

By 1927 Chaim Soutine had climbed out of real poverty. A Jewish emigrant from a village near Minsk, he had spent years half-starving in Paris until the American collector Albert Barnes bought dozens of his canvases at a stroke in 1923 and made his name. In these flush years he painted a whole cast of the people who served the grand hotels and restaurants of the city: bellboys, cooks, chambermaids, and here a floor waiter in his working uniform. Soutine sets the figure against a vibrating red ground and lets the paint twist and thicken, so the young man seems to sway where he stands. He knew these workers from the inside, from his own years of hunger in Paris.