Juliana Force at the Whitney Studio Club - Guy Pène du Bois - Orientalist Painting - Canvas Prints

The painting is of Pène's favourite director Juliana Force. Force was so drawn to Whitney Museum of American Art and her circle that that her own husband was reduced to a background figure in her life. Pène insisted on painting Force when he fatefully encountered her at the museum. Pène was a noted art critic and painter and even later, when he became the noted painter, he was still the art critic as well, coining his brief aphorisms with a dash of cosmopolitan cynicism, cool wisdom and dry humor.

I regretted the intervention of his trips abroad; but our intimate conversations were resumed whenever opportunity afforded, Pène remaining as ever my real spiritual comrade. He was always a wise friend, a wise teacher, the possessor of an individual and rare skill in painting, his life a notable one, his contacts illustrious. I envy him only all that his history entails in names and places, covering so much of our present art history.