Some paintings arrive with a story already attached, and Portrait of Colette came with a particularly good one. Painted around 1920 by the French artist Élisabeth Fuss-Amoré, it shows one of France’s most celebrated and scandalous writers in a moment of quiet reverie. It is a lovely painting by a woman who is not nearly as well known as she deserves to be, and we are delighted to welcome it into The Bennett Collection.
Colette was the great libertine of French letters. Across the 1920s and 30s she produced a run of novelettes and stories that treated desire with a frankness few writers of her day would attempt. Her private life was no less unconventional. Her very public relationships with women scandalized Paris, and when she died in 1954 the Catholic Church refused her a religious funeral. She is remembered by many for Gigi, but her reputation has only deepened since. Judith Thurman’s biography Secrets of the Flesh, which was so well received when it appeared, helped introduce her to a new generation of readers. It is a biography of Colette written by a woman, which feels fitting. The material that shocked readers a century ago seems tame now, but it was decidedly racy then.
What first struck us about Fuss-Amoré’s portrait is how little it resembles that reputation. Here Colette is thoughtful, almost virginal, her gaze turned inward and her expression soft. The painterly brushwork and tender handling place her in a moment of rest and self-possession, and the viewer feels they have almost stumbled into a private moment. It is a surprising way to see the woman the world thought it knew.
Fuss-Amoré’s own story is just as compelling. Élisabeth Bégard was born in Paris in 1879 into a family of jewelers. Her father died when she was three, and she was raised by her grandparents in Belgium. Little is known of those early years, but she returned to Paris and in 1904 married the writer Gustave Fuss-Amoré, entering the city’s progressive literary and artistic circles.
She was also an activist. In 1910 she took part in the Midinette strikes, a labor action by Parisian women workers protesting lower wages and the assumption that their work was only a temporary phase of life, and she became a vocal spokesperson for pay equality between the sexes. From the early 1920s she exhibited regularly at the Salon des Indépendants, the Salon d’Automne and the Montparnasse cafés that served as hubs for avant-garde artists, and she became known for her still lifes and portraits. Her friend Amedeo Modigliani painted her portrait, and the writer André Salmon described her as “crazy about colour.” Her work carried the experimentation and social engagement of Parisian modernism, yet her name has largely faded since her death in 1959.
Which raises a question we can’t resist. A painter this attentive and a sitter this magnetic make one wonder whether something passed between them. We can’t say, and the painting doesn’t tell. What it offers instead is the tenderness of one woman’s view of another, and we’re happy to let the rest remain a mystery.