The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Gertrude Stein was studying at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore when her brother Leo informed her about an innovative French painter named Paul Cézanne. After seeing Cézanne’s paintings, Stein made Paris her home and went often to the gallery of Ambroise Vollard, the only art dealer who sold Cézanne’s work. The Stein siblings began their art collection from these visits to Vollard. For Stein, purchasing a portrait of a woman by Cézanne was important because it was “in looking and looking at this picture” that she was inspired to start writing Three Lives, a book about three women that was eventually published in 1909 (28). In her writing, Stein was passionate about making innovations at the sentence level, and she had the habit of beginning writing at eleven at night and continuing until dawn.

In the next autumn salon, Matisse displayed his famous painting La Femme au Chapeau (1905) in the Petit Palais salon of works that had been refused by the official academy. The Stein siblings bought the painting, although many onlookers mocked it, not knowing what to make of its novelty. Stein got to know the Matisses well and went often to their small, exquisitely furnished apartment in St.