Soutine's The Bellboy

Chaïm Soutine's The Bellboy draws the eye with its awkward, in-between pose — neither fully seated nor standing. The boy may well have been sitting on a chair when Soutine painted him, but Soutine deliberately left the chair out of the picture. His disregard for proportion leaves the legs and hands elongated and the torso compressed.

The painting takes its cue from Portrait of Monsieur Bertin, by the French master Ingres — the arm position and seated pose echo one another closely. But where Ingres painted a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, Soutine's subject is a working-class figure, a restaurant employee. The other key difference is the chair itself: Soutine treated the chair as a symbol of a stable life, and removed it here to capture the precarious, hand-to-mouth existence of a boy working as a bellhop.