Oil portrait painting Philomène by Sonia Delaunay, 1907, in a black frame on a white museum wall. The subject wears red, face painted in yellow and blue-green planes, against a dark background with coral daubs. A wall label is visible to the right.

Sonia Delaunay — Philomène, 1907, on Display in Museum Gallery

5 October 2017 · Paris

Sonia Delaunay's Philomène, painted in 1907, hangs in a black frame against a pale gallery wall — the subject rendered in bold yellows and reds against a dark ground scattered with loose coral brushstrokes. It is an early Fauvist portrait: the face fractured into flat planes of unexpected colour, the background treated as pattern rather than space. The wall label to the right situates it in the joint legacy of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, tracing colour as both formal engine and point of departure.

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