1927

Woman with a Palette

American, born Van Province, Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey), c. 1904 - 1948

Gorky completed this large and ambitious painting in 1927 and later sold it to the architect Maxfield Vogel, who in the early 1930s shared an apartment with the artists Willem de Kooning, Robert Jonas, and Bart van der Shilling at 40 Union Square, just down the street from Gorky's studio. Although preceded by several related studies featuring a seated woman holding a palette and paintbrush in a studio setting, the painting remained in private hands until 2004, when the architect's daughter contacted the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which acquired the work later that year.