Description

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec painted this portrait when he was only 22 years old and still an art student. He used subtle coloring with accents of pink and green and showed his subject, Jeanne Wenz, in full profile, a compositional device often found in Renaissance portraiture. Wenz was the mistress of Frederic Wenz, Toulouse-Lautrec’s fellow student at the painter Fernand Cormon’s studio. She was also the friend of Suzanne Valadon, an artist in her own right and a frequent sitter for Toulouse-Lautrec.

Provenance

Given by the artist to Arthur-Paul Huc, Toulouse [see Roqué 1999]. Paul Rosenberg, Paris, by 1912 [see Dortu 1971]. Pierre Decourcelle, Paris, by at least 1914 [lent by him to Paris 1914]; sold, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, June 16, 1926, no. 78, for 63,000 francs, to Jerome Stonborough [according to annotated copy of the Decourcelle sale catalogue in the library of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; copy in curatorial file]; Jerome Stonborough (died 1938), New York; his estate sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, October 17, 1940, no. 70; Paul Rosenberg and Co., New York, Nov. 17, 1940 [according to the Rosenberg ledger, no. 120, Museum of Modern Art, New York, copy in curatorial file and letter of May 5, 1977, from Alexandre Rosenberg, who stated that the firm acquired the painting on 17 November, 1940, from the estate of Stonborough]; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, October 3, 1941.