This page was made for you. It tells the story of this painting, the remarkable artist who made it, the corner of France where it was found, and the world it came from.
A young girl looks out at you, steady and composed, with an expression that is thoughtful and quietly grown-up. She is not posed as a cute child. She is painted as a person, someone with an inner life the artist took seriously. That is the first thing worth noticing, because it tells you what kind of painter made her.
The face is built from simplified, softly modeled forms and a warm palette of earthy browns and muted reds, with nothing extra and nothing showy. Dobrinsky trained first as a sculptor, and you can feel it here: the head has real structure and weight, as if it were built rather than drawn, and the brushwork stays visible and deliberate, letting you see the hand that made it. This is the restraint of a painter who wants you looking at the sitter, not the technique.
The effect is warmth without sentimentality. She is poised, a little serious, and completely present, and she rewards living with. The kind of face you glance at across a room and feel accompanied by. That quality, a plain human presence that deepens the longer you know it, was Dobrinsky's whole life's work, and it is here in full.
Isaac Dobrinsky was born in 1891 in Makariv, in what is now Ukraine, into a devout Jewish family. He trained first as a sculptor in Kyiv, and then, in 1912, like so many gifted young artists of his generation, he made his way to Paris. What he walked into was one of the most extraordinary gatherings of talent in the history of art.
Dobrinsky settled at La Ruche, "The Beehive," a ramshackle circular building of cheap studios in Montparnasse. This was not just any address. La Ruche was the cradle of the School of Paris. Its residents, at the same time as Dobrinsky, included Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine, Fernand Leger, Zadkine, and Lipchitz. He did not visit the birthplace of modern art. He lived inside it, for more than twenty years.
And he was not on the edge of that world. He shared his studio with Chaim Soutine, today considered one of the giants of modern painting, a man whose canvases now sell for tens of millions. Soutine, looking back, said something remarkable about his old studio-mate. He said: "Dobrinsky, you were my master." The artist who painted your young girl was called master by one of the most celebrated painters of the 20th century. He also went about with Modigliani, whose friendship he never forgot, and whose drawing would one day help save his life.
Dobrinsky never chased fame. He said plainly, "My values are not those of the world." After illness ended his sculpture, he gave himself entirely to painting people, and to one pursuit above all: capturing the true inner presence of whoever sat before him. He exhibited at the Paris salons, including the Salon d'Automne, and painted his wife Vera again and again.
His was also a life shaped by history. As a Ukrainian Jew, he fled occupied Paris in 1942, and survived the war, reportedly aided by a drawing Modigliani had once given him. Afterward, he painted a tender, unforgettable series of portraits of Jewish children orphaned by the war. That deep, careful attention to the face of a child, which you can feel in your own painting, came from the most human place imaginable. Today his portraits are held in private collections and sought at auction around the world.
Dobrinsky painted in Paris, but this portrait had traveled south by the time I found it, to Aspremont, a tiny hilltop village in the Alpes-Maritimes, about ten kilometers into the hills above Nice and the French Riviera. That is where its journey to you began.
Aspremont is one of those perched villages the south of France does so beautifully. Built in the 15th century, its stone houses spiral outward in concentric rings around a Gothic church at the summit, so the whole village forms a kind of crown on top of the hill. Around it lie terraced fields of olive trees and vines, and from its edges the view runs all the way down the Var valley to the blue line of the Mediterranean.
Above the village rises Mont Chauve, "Bald Mountain," topped by the ruins of a 19th-century fort. The village has been inhabited since antiquity, once a stronghold of the Counts of Provence. It is quiet, green, and timeless, the kind of place people guard like a secret.
And it sits in the most painted landscape in France. This is Matisse and Chagall country. Both spent their late years in these same hills above Nice, chasing the same Mediterranean light. It is a fitting place for a School of Paris portrait to have come to rest before crossing the ocean to you.
The painting's journey: made in Paris, found in Aspremont in the hills above Nice, and now traveling to you.
Dobrinsky's great years in Montparnasse fell across the 1920s, the most glamorous, inventive decade Paris has ever known. The Great War was over, and the city became the beating heart of art, fashion, music, and pleasure, drawing writers and painters from all over the world. While the cafes of Montparnasse overflowed each night, Dobrinsky sat quietly in his studio at La Ruche, painting faces. Here is the world that surrounded him.
This painting is an oil on panel, which appreciates a stable environment. These are the basics of keeping her beautiful for the decades ahead.
Every painting that leaves Raw Brush goes to someone I will probably never meet. I film a short message for each one, so that at least once, you hear directly from the person who found it.
In this video I share what drew me to this painting, and a genuine thank you for trusting me with your walls.