“I am not a painter of modern life. I am a painter of women.”

Marie Laurencin began her artistic career with the intention of becoming a porcelain painter, but soon found herself at the heart of the Parisian avant-garde. It was Georges Braque who introduced her to Picasso and the circle around the Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre, and it was there she met the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who became her lover for six years and her most important artistic collaborator.

She exhibited with the Cubists and took part in the legendary Armory Show in New York in 1913 — but never quite let herself be drawn into their visual language. While Picasso and Braque broke the world down into geometric fragments, she developed something entirely her own. Her painting has an elusive, melancholic quality — soft, floating compositions in which the figures seem to exist in their own dreamlike reality.

During the interwar years she became one of Paris's most sought-after artists — painted Coco Chanel's portrait, designed costumes and sets for the Ballets Russes, appeared on the cover of Vogue. She died in 1956 of a heart attack, the day after lunch with an old friend, and was buried at Père-Lachaise in a white dress, a rose in her hand and Apollinaire's letters pressed against her heart.