This diminutive painting by Andre Derain is a pivotal work that reveals the artist’s keen understanding of avant-garde sources and painterly developments. Sometimes dated as early as 1908, this work marks the point when Derain, co-inventor together with Henri Matisse of Fauvism, reins in the wild intensity of his use of color and returns to a palette and a theme inspired by Cézanne. In 1907, the influential art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (from whom Saidie May later purchased this work) offered Derain an exclusive contract. This enabled the artist to move to the Montmartre quarter of Paris where his friendship with Picasso and his circle grew. The blocky compression of pictorial space in this composition almost certainly reveals Derain’s awareness of Picasso and Braque’s early cubist experiments. Derain was also engaged at this time producing woodcut illustrations for the poet Guillaume Apollinaire’s book L’Enchanteur Pourissant (The Rotting Enchanter). Some of the bold simplification of forms and graphic sensibility evident here may reflect this experience as well.