Soutine's Choir Boy

Between 1925 and 1930, Chaïm Soutine painted a series of portraits of choir boys. Soutine, who was Jewish, took up the subject not out of any religious conviction, but because he'd been captivated by a choir boy in a Courbet painting he often admired at the Louvre — specifically, by the boy's red-and-white choir robe.

For Soutine, red was a powerful color carrying life and death, suffering and passion all at once, which is why it recurs so often throughout his work. The Courbet painting that inspired him, A Burial at Ornans, now hangs at the Musée d'Orsay.