With her hair slicked back and her lips smeared with crimson lipstick, this elegant woman's overall appearance exemplifies the distinct modernity of women between the wars. A painter of European high society, Philip de László (1869-1937), used a similarly free style to suggest her features and her loose blouse, sharply cut at the neckline, in the androgynous (and therefore highly provocative) fashion known as the 'garçonne' style of the Roaring Twenties.

Germaine Gien (1895-1989) married Léon Bélugou (1865-1934) in 1919. It was to her husband that the painter dedicated this portrait of his wife, painted two years after their marriage. Gien was 26 at the time. He had met Bélugou through his singing teacher, Lucienne Bréval (1865-1935), a world-famous singer in her day and a member of the cosmopolitan Parisian high society so well described by Marcel Proust (1871-1922). Although he won first prize at the Conservatoire in 1917, Gien came from humble beginnings and needed a protector. Bélugou was a wealthy man. He was a journalist, writer and director of a mining company, and during the First World War he took part in the charity work of the Countess of Greffuhle (1860-1952). Very well connected, he was an intimate of Edith Wharton (1862-1937) and one of her famous "B's", as she described her close friends who shared the same initial (Berenson, Blanche, Berry, etc.). Wharton mentions the pair in one of her letters, pointing out that her friend Bélugou had a 'late great passion that does not suit him - the target is 25' (H. Lee, Edith Wharton, London, 2013, p. 296). Gien will also refer to this considerable age difference many years later, as the historian Claudine Lesage recalls: 'Age made no difference' (C. Lesage, Edith Wharton in France, Bristol, 2018).