Marie Laurencin (1883-1956) was one of the most beloved French artists of the early twentieth century, whose distinctive feminine vision brought a distinctive voice to the male-dominated world of the Parisian avant-garde. Born in Paris to Pauline Laurencin and Alfred Toulet, a man about whom she knew nothing until much later in her life, she grew up in modest circumstances that her mother worked hard to protect. At the age of eighteen, at the behest of her mother, she began to study porcelain painting at Sèvres, the leading porcelain factory in Europe at the time.

In 1903 Laurencin returned to Paris and enrolled at the modest Académie Humbert to study art, where, under the influence of her friend Georges Braque, she decided to concentrate on oil painting. It was through Braque that Laurencin befriended many of the Montmartre artists, poets, writers, and musicians, including Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Marcel Duchamp, and a young Pablo Picasso. It was during this period that Laurencin also met the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who would become both her lover and her greatest advocate in the press.

In 1912 Laurencin collaborated on the Maison Cubiste with Raymond Duchamp-Villon and André Mare, a project which represented her first foray into the field of design. She exhibited at the landmark Armory Show of 1913 in New York, wrote poetry, made book illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and designed sets for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and for the Comédie Française in 1928. She was also a costume designer, interior designer, and lithographer in addition to being a painter.

Among Laurencin's commissioned portraits is her celebrated portrait of Coco Chanel made in 1923. Her work in pastels and curvilinear designs stood as a check to the modernism of the day and defined her work as a feminine alternative to the arrogant, somewhat brash, and linear Cubism of her peers. Her paintings bespoke the image of the modern woman in the Art Deco-inspired Jazz Age of Paris, and provided a lucrative income during the 1940s, as her works were in great demand. In 1956 Marie Laurencin died of a heart attack and was buried according to her wishes in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, dressed in a white dress with a rose in her hand and the letters from her first lover Guillaume Apollinaire placed next to her heart.