The Little Pastry Cook

In 1923 the dealer Paul Guillaume had a Soutine pastry cook hanging at his place in Paris, and when the American collector Albert Barnes saw it he said, it's a peach. Barnes went on to buy Soutine canvases by the dozen, and a painter who had been living on almost nothing became collectable overnight. Guillaume wrote about that first pastry cook in his own review, dwelling on the boy's immense and magnificent ear, and called it a masterpiece. It left for Pennsylvania with Barnes. In the early 1930s Guillaume bought this second version, he said, in memory of the one he had liked so much. The Orangerie has it because the state acquired the Walter-Guillaume collection in 1963.