From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
My mother assumed it was a portrait of my grandmother. The date in the corner fitted that assumption: 1936, when my grandmother was 18 years old. And the resemblance to her, as a young woman, was convincing enough, if rather idealised. But it’s clear that no one was looking that closely. They were a well-to-do family, well connected with artists, and there were a few portraits around, among many other paintings. This one hung in the dining room, unremarked upon.
After my grandmother died, when the contents of the house were being divided between the family, I asked for this picture. Even if it wasn’t the best likeness of Grandma, it was a charming picture in its own right, with those bright, pretty colours in her dress. And there was a slight air of mystery: the near-smile and the side-eye had a knowing quality. The giltwood frame was rather battered, but all the more characterful for it.
When I took it off the wall, I was disappointed. A label on the back revealed it was not a painting at all, but a print of a painting by Marie Laurencin, issued by the Medici Society of Bond Street. It was not Grandma. ‘Portrait of a girl’ was all the label said. I looked it up in the best guide we had to the pictures in the house, a valuation report prepared by an auctioneer for insurance purposes in the 1980s. ‘Portrait of a girl, bust length, in pink and blue dress,’ the report said. Pink and blue? Partly, I suppose, but it was just as much orange and green. The value was put at £100, and next to this my grandmother had added a note: ‘Bought by us in 1940 for £5!’
Francine Bessy (1936), Marie Laurencin. Private collection. Photo: Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images; © Fondation Foujita
The picture came home with me, and I hung it in our bedroom. I still thought of it as Grandma, even if it was just an inexpensive print bought in wartime London. Laurencin was unfamiliar to me, so I searched online for her and found she was a pioneering, if somewhat neglected, cubist; a rare woman in the largely male avant-garde of pre-war Paris. Guillaume Apollinaire, who had been her lover, devotes part of his meditation on cubist painters to her, writing that her art ‘dances like Salome’ between that of Picasso, who, like John the Baptist, ‘bathes all the arts in a baptism of light’, and that of Rousseau, ‘a sentimental Herod’. But who was the girl? My initial cursory search was discouraging: she painted many, many girls.
Not long after the picture came home with me, I had a near-miss with the girl in the flesh. A Mayfair gallery was hosting a small show of Laurencin portraits, so I went along with a phone snap of ‘Grandma’ and asked the young woman minding the store if she knew anything about it. Why yes, she said – she didn’t know the name of the subject, but that exact painting, or one very like it, had been brought in a couple of days before for valuation. It was owned by someone nearby – not far from where the print had been bought 80 years earlier.
Or one very like it. That’s also plausible. The ‘girl’ is in fact Francine Bessy, a star of French cinema, who was described as Laurencin’s muse and whom the artist painted 30 times. Laurencin was romantically linked to both men and women; her interest in Bessy evidently exceeded the aesthetic. In a photograph in a French magazine from 1942, she gazes at the young star with radiant fondness. Bessy was just six months older than my grandmother, and was 19 in 1936.
So, it’s not Grandma. But it also is. The year the print was purchased, 1940, was the year my grandparents married, during the Blitz. My grandmother was a recent graduate from art school, working for the Red Cross, and my grandfather was a young doctor working at Barts hospital. The engagement was very brief and the marriage lasted more than 60 years. ‘Bought by us,’ Grandma’s note said, a joint act, so my guess is that it was intended for their first home together, a flat on Charterhouse Square. I suspect that the resemblance to Grandma was part of that. And I think I understand the enigma of Bessy’s smile, and those eyes that almost make contact, but not quite, and all those gorgeous fascinating colours around a face that is not giving anything away. There’s love in it, and it was bought in love.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.