Soutine's Portrait of Émile Lejeune

Chaïm Soutine's Portrait of Émile Lejeune depicts Lejeune, a painter and patron from Geneva, Switzerland, who was active in Paris and was a friend of Soutine's. The portrait was painted before Lejeune left the city for another one.

Soutine's style is unmistakable here: the sitter's face is rendered with the same warping distortion the painter used to express inner character. Soutine was known for spending long stretches of time on a sitting in order to capture a subject's inner self, a process that reportedly made posing for him a genuinely difficult experience.