Who is the young woman looking the artist in the eye? The only thing we know about her is her forename. This portrait must have meant a lot to the German-Jewish painter Anne Ratkowski. She burnt many of her works before fleeing to Belgium in 1938 to escape the Nazis. But she took this one with her and kept it when she later emigrated to the United States. Ratkowski’s art was above all influenced by her teacher Arthur Segal. In the late 1920s he gave up his fascination with optical phenomena and adopted a naturalistic technique. Together with others, Ratkowski and her husband, the artist Nikolaus Braun, founded the “New Naturalists” in 1935.