Mercédès Legrand (1893-1945), Portrait Of A Young Woman, Circa 1935, Oil On Panel

Mercédès LEGRAND (1893-1945)
Portrait of a young woman, circa 1935
Oil on panel (carton bouilli)
Signed lower left
36 x 29 cm

Born in 1893 in Spain to Belgian parents, Mercédès Legrand was a painter, poet and art critic. She trained as an artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels from 1916 to 1919, after which the city of Nassogne commissioned her to design a war memorial, which was inaugurated in 1920. It was the first Belgian memorial to be created by a woman. The artist met the painter and art critic Roger van Gindertael, who would become her husband. Together, they created the magazine Hélianthe, devoted to the arts, which Marcel Baugniet also collaborated with. In 1925, the couple moved to Paris before separating.

Mercédès Legrand frequented the Parisian artistic and literary avant-garde. She devoted herself to painting and writing and published two collections of poems: Horcajo and Géographies. A first monographic exhibition was dedicated to her at the Fermé la nuit gallery in 1928. In 1934, the woman who was considered the heir to Marie Laurencin took part in the second Contemporary Portraits exhibition organized by the Paris gallery, the preface to the catalog of which was written by Jacques-Emile Blanche.

Mercédès Legrand also exhibited regularly at the Salon d'Automne and the Salon des Tuileries. She represented Belgium at the exhibition Les Femmes artistes d'Europe exposent at the Jeu de Paume, which took place in 1937. This was the first French exhibition exclusively devoted to contemporary women artists such as Marie Laurencin, Tamara de Lempicka, Suzanne Valadon and Natalia Gontcharova.

The artist left Paris for Limoges on the occasion of the appointment of her second husband Edmond Kayser as head of the Musée Adrien-Dubouché and the École nationale d'art décoratif. Her painted work was critically well-received during her lifetime.

The work we are presenting is the supposed portrait of one of the artist's two daughters, Marie-Claire or Antoinette. Mercédès Legrand often made them her models, whom she treated with great tenderness.