Saidie Adler May, one of The Baltimore Museum of Art’s greatest patrons, was fifty-eight years old when she commissioned the French painter Othon Friesz to paint her portrait in 1937. She had known Friesz since 1928, when May attended painting classed at the Académie Scandinave in Paris where he was her teacher. The portrait he created is a sympathetic if not overly flattering picture that captures Saidie’s good-humored expression as well as a sense of her unwavering determination. It is executed in Friesz’s characteristically loose, painterly style. The palette, however, is subdued when one recalls the painter’s early career exhibiting together with colorful Fauvist painters such as Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Maurice de Vlaminck.