Galerie Romanet, Paris
Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner

Barcelona, La Pinacoteca, Foujita, 1953, n.n.
Béziers, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Collections privées de Béziers, 1967, no. 96
Béziers, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Collections privées de Béziers et sa région, 1969, no. 130

Sylvie Buisson, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita, vol. II, Paris, 2001, no. 56.83, illustrated p. 451 (incorrectly dated 1956)

This work is in excellent condition. Canvas is not lined. Surface is very slightly dirty. There is some minor frame abrasion to the extreme edges. Under UV light no inpainting is apparent.
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The present work is testament to some of the major preoccupations of Foujita's mature period. In discussing this period and the artist's focus on the female model in medieval dress, Robert Rey talks of how "in Asia, every childhood is sacred... it is by instinct that Foujita transforms the children of France into fairies. Consider what becomes of Cosette from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, a book the artist perhaps never read... a little girl unburdened by the slightest misery' (quoted in Sylvie Buisson, Foujita et ses amis du Montparnasse, Paris, 2010, p. 134). Foujita's paintings from this period increasingly combined religious or historical imagery with a remarkable sensibility for feminine expression to create images subtly laden with suggestion and strong visual impact. As Sylvie Buisson explains, "the boundaries between the sacred and the profane became confused" (ibid.).

In Les Deux petites filles, Foujita situates his quasi-Mannerist female figures against a rural backdrop. Though it is tempting to identify a narrative, Foujita prevents such a reading, favoring instead a lexicon of signs and symbols. The figure at left holds a carefully described and somewhat suggestive bird's nest, an intriguing element that sets this work apart from others in Foujita's oeuvre. The artist's symbolism is not clearly signified, though the hypnotic draw of these figures is unavoidable.

Shortly after it was painted, this work was exhibited in a seminal solo exhibition of 1953 in Barcelona at La Pinacoteca (see fig. 1).