Galerie Île-de-France, Paris
Galleria Gian Ferrari, Milan
Galleria dell'Annunciata, Milan
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Jacques Dupin & Ariane Lelong-Mainaud, Joan Miró, Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings 1942-1955, Paris, 2001, vol. III, no. 660, illustrated p. 21

The canvas is not lined. There are two 2 by 1cm. retouchings to the upper left and upper right corners and a few scattered pinhead-sized spots of retouching towards the centre of the work. Due to previous frame rubbing, there is a thin 4cm. line of retouching to the centre of the left edge with a couple of smaller spots above it, and another intermittent line of retouching running down to the lower left corner. There is a small area of spots of retouching to the centre of the lower edge and a line of small scattered spots of retouching running down two thirds of the right edge. All retouching is visible under UV light. Overall this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall a fairly accurate representation, although the yellow tones are more pronounced in the original.
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The onset of the Spanish Civil War exiled Miró to France between 1936 and 1940. The years spent in Paris, witnessing from afar the victory of General Franco, were the catalyst for the production of works from the so-ca𒐪lled 'savage period'. The Nazi invasion of Western Europe in 1939 forced Miró to return to his native Spain, where he spent the war years producing some of his most compelling works. Miró's arrival in Spain heralded a four-year odyssey where the artist experimented with watercolour, gouache, pastel and oil-wash on paper.

In 1944, Miró returned to painting in oils after four years of intensive exploration of other media which began with the important Constellation series painted between 1940-41. The artist continued to work on a small scale, partly due to the limited materials available during the war, and developed the Woman-Bird-Star series which was born from the multiplicity of signs and themes present in the Constellations. The period spent in Spain between 1940 and 1945 was crucial for the forging of Miró's definitive style. Most of the signs or elements he devised continued to populate his paintings and drawings of later years. While in the mid-1920s, Miró experimented wi𝓡th poetic titles, sometimes transcribing them directly to the canvas, by the early 1930s, he decided that poetic titles or almost any titles except those of the most non-descriptive kind (e.g. Figure, Personnage, etc.) lent themselves to interpretations he wished to avoid. It was not until the late 1930s when Miró returned to providing his works with eloquent titles, most of which came to him during the act of painting.