As inscribed in the lower left corner, this is the second La Gamme jaune, now housed in the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. In this early self portrait the artist leans back in his cane rocking chair, elegantly holding a cigarette in his left hand and a book in his right. Although more realistic than the final version, this work is already clearly influenced by Fauvism while still retaining some Symbolist characteristics. Krisztina Passuth describes the final version in the catalogue of the 1989/1990 Kupka exhibition in Paris as follows, "Cette toile, parmi les oeuvres majeures de l'artiste, est d'une grande singularité par son fauvisme expressif et son orphisme 'mystique' naissant ... Composée en camaïeu de jaunes, elle rappelle ceux que Sonia Delaunay et Max Pechstein peignaient à la même époque, notamment par ses jaunes aux reflets verts qui lui confèrent un effet tout à fait hallucinatoire".

The French title La Gamme Jaune, translatable as The Yellow Spectrum, indicates perhaps that the artist meant this work to be an investigation of the function of colour rather than a symbolic portrait. Kupka was to say " It is the ensemble of forms in a human face which impresses us at first. It is only afterwards that we understand the importance of each feature" In reference to unified colour, he wrote in 1912-13: "the atmosphere of a work is more or less its spiritual factor. Atmosphere in a painting is achieved through bathing the canvas in a single scale of colors [une seule gamme de teintes]. Naturally this can be a scale of bright yellows, of brilliant reds, as long as there is a chromatic unity. This is arrived at through the elimination of complementaries, contrasts and even the diminution of ight intensity. Thus one achieves an état d'âme, exteriorized in luminous form."

There has been some conjecture about the identity of the sitter for the final version but the discorvery of the present lot has conclusively solved that question.