Guadeloupean Woman with a Jug, by Emma Ruff (born in 1884)

Oil on canvas, giltwood frame
France 1930s
165 x 125 cm (65 x 49¼ in., with accessories)

This portrait of a Caribbean woman bears the signature of Emma Ruff, a landscape and portrait painter born in Paris in 1884, who trained under Marcel Bachet and Louise Thoret. A member of the Société des Artistes français, from which she received a medal late in her career, Ruff exhibited from 1914 at the Salon des Artistes français and, during the 1920s, at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune.

She appears to have made a particular practice of depicting subjects from the Carribeans. At least one Portrait of a Guadeloupean Woman bearing her signature is known, as well as a Young Antillaise shown at the Salon d'Hiver of 1946, although none of these works appears to approach, in its scale and its dimensions, the ambition of the present portrait.

See Explication des ouvrages de peinture, sculpture, architecture, gravure et lithographie des artistes vivants exposés au Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées avenue Alexandre III le 30 avril 1914, Paris, 1914; Maurice de Waleffe, ed., Paris-Midi, 20 March 1929; Salon d'Hiver. XLIe exposition. Catalogue des œuvres exposées, Paris, 1949; Catherine Carter Goebel, ed., Liberal Arts through the Ages, Rock Island, 2011.