Chaïm Soutine (1893-1943) was one of the most significant modern painters in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, he produced a series of extraordinary portraits of cooks, waiters, bellboys and other staff from France's golden age of grand hotels and fashionable restaurants. These paintings have long been considered some of the artist's most iconic works. Soutine posed his sitters in their distinctive uniforms, from cooks in whites to bellboys in vibrant reds. Through his remarkably vivid brushwork, Soutine contrasted their professional attire with a deeply felt sense of their individual characters and the toil of their working lives. He was the only artist to make these quintessentially modern workers a major subject of avant-garde painting. This catalogue is the first publication devoted to this important portrait series and accompanies the exhibition Soutine's Portraits : Cooks, Waiters & Bellboys at The Courtauld Gallery, London.
