The model and the still life are both viewed from the same head-on angle. Sometimes, certain elements such as books or flowers, which are kind of totems for the artist, circulate through the language of the paintings and turn up in paintings within the paintings. As he so nicely puts it, Jean-Philippe Delhomme envisions his still lifes as “satellites of [his] portraits.” And while the formats used for his subjects vary, all these paintings share the same sustained and very contrasting chromatic scale, with deep blacks in opposition to large flat tints of blue, orange, or green, recalling the treatment of color in the paintings of Henri Matisse or Alex Katz, two artists who have a particular place in Delhomme’s pantheon.
This painting belongs to a series dedicated to the artist's Parisian studio, located in a Montparnasse landmark building that has housed artists since its construction in 1927.