Portrait of a young girl

Koch I: I myself also bought a painting by Levy, namely the colourful painting of an adolescent girl sitting with her hair down at a Chinese table with a yellow tablecloth, in front of her a bouquet of red poppies wrapped in a white cover. From the approximately one-square-metre surface of the painting emanated an incomprehensible amount of light and unbroken pure colours in a compelling euphony.[...] I also had it here in Essentuki. It then disappeared with my other pictures during the occupation. Perhaps it did not perish. I later learned from an official of the local security police, somewhat reliably, that a Gestapo official had sent my pictures to Germany. [...] This was a girl of about sixteen, half still a child, a model like others, but one who occupied a certain position in the circle, a proletarian child, but a self-confident creature, graceful in all her gauntness and angularity, who lived in the interests of her painters and there quickly absorbed an unusual amount of bohemian education and culture, a nascent love artist of stature. The girl later became an art rider and finally a coquette of great style with a princely attitude to life. [...] The beautiful picture cost only two hundred francs, which I could not pay immediately, but paid off in rapid instalments from Frankfurt. [...]

Koch II: Portrait of an adolescent girl with loose hair, in a blue dress in front of a table in bright yellow on which she holds a bouquet of my memory red poppies in a white paper cuff. The picture was painted under the influence of the Parisian colourist Henry Matisse in 1908. I bought it immediately after its completion in the studio of the artist Rudolf Levy, whom I know, at a price of 200 francs. [...] Oil. Simple golden frame, unglazed. Format of a medium salon picture. Format standing rectangle."

US - NARA: "with flowing hair. She holds a bouquet of flowers wrapped in decorative paper."