Born Ivan Dombrowski in Warsaw in 1886, John Graham often blurred details of his life with fabrications and half-truths. For example, although he could lay a valid claim to Polish and German aristocracy on his mother's side, he boasted at various times to be of Russian nobility, playmate of Czar Nicholas (twenty years his senior), playmate of Czarevitch Alexis (twenty years his junior), and a member of the Romanov family. Sailing to the United States in 1920, Graham enrolled at the Art Students League in New York in 1923. Shortly thereafter he met his third wife, Elinor Gibson, a Baltimore native, and probably came in contact with the Cone sisters about 1925 through his involvement with the Friends of Art, a group of artists and patrons active in promoting the arts in Baltimore. Correspondence between Graham and the Cone sisters reveals Claribel had seen Landscape of Beaucaire in Paris during a trip in the summer of 1927. The painting had formerly been owned by the Washington collector Duncan Phillips, who exchanged it with the artist for a larger example.