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Description: le rouquin signed oil on canvas 80 by 60 cm., 31 1/2 by 23 5/8 in. Painted in 1917. Provenance Alphonse Kahn, Paris Acquired from the above by the present owner in the late 1940s Exhibited Paris, Galerie Charpentier, L'Ecole de Paris dans les collections belges, 1959 Literature Elie Faure, Soutine, Paris, 1929, p. 3, illustrated Pierre Courthion, Soutine, peintre du dechirant, Lausanne, 1972, p. 183, C, illustrated Painted in 1917, Le Rouquin (The Redhead) is an important early portrait executed at the height of Soutine's Expressionist style. The formality of the figure's dress - with starched collars, dark tie and white handkerchief - suggests that the work is perhaps a commissioned portrait, and Soutine appears to relish his treatment of the unidentified man's face and elongated right hand in particular. The portrait epitomises Soutine's mature style, with its great expressiveness of gesture, rhythmically charged brushstroke and use of earthy colours. Monroe Wheeler writes of the group of artists with whom Soutine mixed in Paris in the late 1910s, and of his character as an artist: 'Soutine, Pascin, Utrillo and Modigliani - they have been grouped together as though violence of temper and proneness to trouble constituted a school of art. In France they are called Les peintres maudits - painters under a curse... Soutine was the least calamitous and least dissipated of the four, but perhaps the saddest. For as his art developed, it offered no distraction from his anxieties, animosities and self-reproach - no escape. Not that he intended any effect of autobiography by means of his art. But from an early age he used his hardship, pessimism and truculence to set a tragic tone for his painting, irrespective of its subject matter. Limiting the themes of his work to conventional categories - still life, landscape, portraiture and picturesque figure-painting - he would always charge his pictures with extreme implications of what he had in mind: violence of nature, universality of hunger, and a peculiar mingling of enthusiasms and antipathies' (M. Wheeler, Chaim Soutine, New York, The Museum of Modern Art (exhibition catalogue), 1950, p. 31). The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Maurice Tuchman.