Portrait of a young woman, elegantly represented dressed in black and wrapped in a mantilla, seated on a park bench. Oil on canvas painting, signed lower left Relined and restored. Art Nouveau wood and stucco frame.
 
Georges Roussin, French painter, was born on November 19, 1854 in Saint-Denis (Reunion Island). Son of Antoine Louis Roussin (1819-1894) painter, lithographer and photographer, he began painting at the Saint-Denis high school, where his father was a drawing teacher. In 1873, he received a scholarship to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he obtained second place in the entrance exam, proof of his artistic talent. He was a pupil of Cabanel, Jules Lefebvre and Millet. He began exhibiting at the Paris Salon in 1878 and thereafter regularly exhibited large historical paintings, portraits and carefully crafted genre paintings, in oil or pastel, at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon des Artistes Français.
 
Throughout his career he received various awards, garnering bronze medals in Versailles and Moscow, a gold medal in Rouen in 1884, a silver medal in Lyon in 1894, an honourable mention outside of competition in Chicago in 1893...
 
In 1930, Georges Roussin left France and settled in Algiers, where he began a fruitful period producing orientalist paintings. In 1935 he obtained a medal at the Salon of the Free Society of Algerian Artists in Algiers, the city where he died in November 1941.
 
Sources: Benezit, Dictionary of Artists; Le blog de Jean-Claude Jørgensen; Dictionnaire des Artistes de l'Algérie.