Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
French Girl
Alice Neel American
Not on view
Between 1921 and 1925, Neel studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, now the Moore College of Art and Design, where she likely made this work. One of Neel’s earliest extant paintings, French Girl reflects Neel’s own budding skills as an artist as much as it does the style and philosophy of one of the school’s most storied professors, Robert Henri (1865–1929), who taught there between 1892 and 1895 and whose book The Art Spirit (1923) Neel read avidly. Working from a model, Neel fuses, as per Henri, careful observation with painterly feeling.