Portrait of Ira Perrot

With portraits that exude a cool elegance and enigmatic sensuality, Tamara de Lempicka became one of the leading artists of the Art Deco era as she distilled the glamour and vitality of postwar Paris and the theatrical sheen of Hollywood celebrity. As the 2025 retrospective mounted by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston revealed, her early works on paper were vital building blocks upon which she based her career, reflecting her rapid assimilation of Cubist and avant-garde currents as she established her signature style. This sketch is among Lempicka’s first portraits of Ira Perrot, the poet who became Lempicka’s lover and foremost muse during her Paris years. In its pensive mood, it is closely related to the 1922 portrait of Perrot titled Young Woman in a Blue Dress, and in has been identified by Gioia Mori as a study related to the full-length portrait, Her Sadness, 1923.