Gertrude Stein by Pablo Picasso

Gertrude Stein was an expatriate American writer and voracious art collector who moved to France in 1903. For some forty years, Stein was a hub of Parisian artistic society, entertaining such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis at the Saturday evening gatherings she hosted in her parlor on the Left Bank of Paris. It was there that Picasso met Henri Matisse, with whom he would become lifelong friends and rivals. Stein, a celebrated writer in her own right (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) became Picasso's principal patron, acquiring his drawings and paintings and exhibiting them in her informal Salon. She would go on to introduce Picasso to several of the time's most influential art dealers.