Cabbages and kings

The first pastry cook Chaïm Soutine painted came out like a collapsed soufflé. The sitter for ‘The Pastry Cook’ (c.1919) was Rémy Zocchetto, a 17-year-old apprentice at the Garetta Hotel in Céret in southern France. He is deflated, lopsided, slouch-shouldered, in a chef’s jacket several sizes too big for him. His hat is askew, his body a scramble of egg-white paint.

Soutine painted at least six cooks in their kitchen livery. In their chef’s whites they look like meringues that have not set (‘Pastry Cook of Cagnes’, 1922), îles flottantes that do not float (‘Cook of Cagnes’, c.1924), and, in the case of the ‘Little Pastry Cook’ (c.1921) from the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, a wiggling line of piped crème pâtissière.

‘Little Pastry Cook’ (‘Le petit pâtissier’), c.1921, Chaim Soutine. Image: ©Courtauld Gallery, Portland Art Museum Ella M. Hirsch Fund

Rémy, the first of Soutine’s ‘petits pâtissiers’, sat six times for the artist. At the end of the last session, Soutine offered the boy a painting instead of the ten sous a sitting he had promised. ‘I was a fool to refuse,’ said Rémy years later. ‘I can understand that now, but his painting seemed to me awfully bad.’

To Rémy, perhaps, but not to the American collector Albert C. Barnes, who, seeing Remy’s portrait in the Paris gallery of Soutine’s dealer Léopold Zborowski in 1922, exclaimed: ‘But it’s a peach!’ Barnes sent a car to fetch the 29-year-old Soutine, who couldn’t afford the price of a coffee in a café, from a bench in Montparnasse. Soutine was delivered, unwashed, to the gallery. Barnes had Soutine take a bath, ordered him clothes from an English tailor, installed him in a smart studio, and proceeded to buy a large number — some say 52, some 54, some as many as a hundred — of his paintings.