Woman with Mandolin, after Corot

In 1916 Gris did something unexpected for a Cubist: he began looking hard at painters of the past, among them Cézanne, Velázquez and Camille Corot. Corot, dead 40 years by then, was admired for quiet late portraits of women holding musical instruments, and Gris took one of those figures and rebuilt her in his own geometry. This is one of three pictures he made after Corot, and the model for them was Josette, his partner, who sat for him through these years. The seated woman and her mandolin are broken into tilted, overlapping planes, yet the pose and the calm of the Corot original still come through. He painted it in September 1916, in the village of Beaulieu, where he and Josette were living out the war.