The American writer and collector Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) met the Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz in 1920 in Paris. The young man asked Stein, by then already a famous writer, to sit for him. Stein was a patron for many artists living in Paris such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Francis Picabia. Not only did she buy works by these artists, but she also occasionally modeled for them. With her unique physiognomy and characteristic hair style—for decades she bound her long hair in a chignon, before cropping it extremely short— she became a source of inspiration for artists of the School of Paris, including Lipchitz, who would take her physical appearance as a starting point for formal research. In this bronze sculpture, Lipchitz focuses on the volumes and lines, highly simplifying the features of his sitter while at the same time creating an extremely recognizable image of Stein.