Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow will include this painting in the forthcoming supplement to their Soutine catalogue raisonné.
In July 1913 Chaim Soutine came to Paris with Michel Kikoïne, a fellow student at the School of Fine Arts in Vilna, Lithuania. They joined Pinchas Krémègne, another Vilna painter, who had arrived in Paris the previous year and who was already established in a studio in La Ruche ("The Beehive") in Montparnasse. La Ruche had been constructed for the Paris Exposition and was later converted for artist's use; it's name referred to its round shape and clusters of artist's studios. Soutine's neighbors at La Ruche included fellow expatriots Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Moise Kisling and Ossip Zadkine. La Ruche was not far from the Cité Falguière, another ramshackle building that housed artist's studios, where Amedeo Modigliani had painted sporadically since 1909. In 1916 Soutine relocated to the Cité Falguière where he lived for the next three years in conditions of extreme poverty, surviving on handouts from friends and meager wages from infrequent day jobs.