Stencil, 310 x 230 mm, Juffermans JM1.
Signed in the plate and numbered 1271 on an edition of 1700.

Originally commissioned for an advertisement for an eyeshadow and published in 1920 in the magazine Feuillet d'art, a magazine edited by Edmond Moussié and Michel Duffet.
In 1917, Van Dongen moved into a magnificent Parisian villa. The workshop became a magnet for Parisian high society: dancers, playboys, cabaret stars and wealthy eccentrics. At the height of the Roaring Twenties, the extravagant and scandalous parties organized by Van Dongen in his studio caused a lot of ink to flow in Paris, which allowed him to obtain a number of commissions for portraits and also contributed to giving him the image of a sort of Great Gatsby from the Netherlands. It is true that her meeting with Jasmy Jacob, whose real name is Léo Jacob, played a large part in this.
With an innate elegance, sure of her taste and her charms, she wore the most daring fashions with sovereign distinction. The affected pose, the rather unpleasant face, the contemptuous look, she exercised absolute reign over the painter's life from 1916 to 1927. If from
1909 -1910 with his portrait of Nino the Parisian, the faces became typical, with their eyes surrounded by black kohl, their suspicious and jaded looks, Jasmy further nourished and enriched his vision of the ocaute reminine.
In fact, in order to further add to the confusion, in his portraits, the artist was accustomed to surrounding the eyes with lines of khål and to enlarge them further. He organized his code of distortions and colors, imbued with a dream of the Orient.
Pierre Schneider (in his Matisse, Flammarion, 1984, p. 233) was right to see in Van Dongen a painter of icons, "those icons that the nature of Fauvism implied, through its hieratic style."
"Through makeup, the woman escapes nature to join the world of rites."
Pierre Schneider thus found certain analyzes of Baudelaire praising makeup when he studied the work of Constantin Guys (The Painter of Modern Life, 1863) :
“The farm (...) fulfills a kind of duty by striving to appear magical and sumatural; it must surprise, it must charm; idol, she must bask in order to be adored
()".
Georges Duthuit, Matisse's son-in-law, wrote acerbic sentences about Van Dongen in his work Les Fauves (1949), but, helped by the artist himself, he clearly saw this intended element of artificiality and concluded ironically: "Exaggerate the essential! »

References:
Van Dongen, The Painter 1877-1968, Collective, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, 1990
Van Dongen found, Anita Hopmans, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997
Van Dongen, Jean-Michel Bouhours and Nathalic Bondil, Hazon, 2008
Van Dongen, Fauve, anarchist and socialite, Anita Hopmans, Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris, 2011