(back to top)

(back to top)

Portia's fashionable hat, with its veil stretched tightly over her face and head, is in keeping with Du Bois' tendency to reduce human forms to a few simplified shapes.

The sitter is dressed in a style that echoes her high social standing.

Du Bois was an art critic as well as an artist.

(back to top)

Guy Pène du Bois

Portia in a Pink Blouse, 1942

Oil on canvas

32 ¼ x 40 ¾ in.

William Ray Adams Memorial Collections

Learn More

Guy Pène du Bois was born in 1884 in Brooklyn, New York, into a French family from New Orleans. His father, a noted critic, brought up his son in a cultured, literary environment. Pène du Bois studied with William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art and later with Robert Henri. He is known for his paintings of high society that incorporate figures with simplified rounded features reminiscent of caricatures. He also worked as a critic for several New York newspapers and became editor of Arts and Decoration. Du Bois first visited Paris in 1905 and returned again in 1924. Fashionable people in Paris cafés became his favorite subject. He began to explore the interactions between men and women and studied them in a variety of public settings. He became known for his paintings of flappers, so popular in the 1920s, sometimes depicting them as threatening figures. His work can be humorous, satirical or emotionally charged. In 1940 he published his autobiography, Artists Say the Silliest Things.

Pène du Bois’s portrait of a friend, the poet Portia LeBrun, has the warm, mellow quality of his later work, when he downplayed his role as social commentator in favor of appealing subjects and beautiful forms. Her fashionable hat, with its veil stretched tightly over her face and head enhances the artist’s desire to reduce human forms to a few simplified shapes. The sitter’s style of dress reveals her high social standing.

References

Betsy Fahlman.  Guy Pène du Bois: Painter of Modern Life. New York: Quantuck Lane Press; illustrated edition, 2004. ISBN-13: 978-1593720056