Chinese Girl

Chinese Girl

Artist	Vladimir Tretchikoff
Year	1952-1953
Type	Oil on canvas

The Chinese Girl (often popularly known as The Green Lady) is a 1950 painting by Vladimir Tretchikoff. It became one of the world's most popular paintings when made into print in the 1960s and 1970s, and is one of the world's best-selling art prints. The painting is of a Chinese girl and is best known for the unusual skin tone used for her face - a blue-green colour, which gives the painting its popular name "The Green Lady". The model was the daughter of a restaurant owner Tretchikoff met in San Francisco - the painting is Tretchikoff's second variation on the theme, after the first (using a different model) was destroyed in a robbery at the artist's studio in South Africa.

Popular culture

This painting can be seen hanging in the background of an animated living room in the music video for the song 'Young Folks' by Peter Bjorn & John. It may also be seen adorning the living room of Bob Rusk, the killer in Alfred Hitchcock's 1972 film, Frenzy. It can also be seen in several Monty Python TV episodes; in a skit where a door-to-door documentary presenter describes the lurid sex lives of mollusks, and in an evening with the cheap laughs, where a moustache is painted on it. The painting is seen in the apartment of Ruby, Shelley Winters' character, in Alfie (1966), as well as in the Mick Jagger movie Performance (1970).

See also

• Red Jacket
• The Dying Swan

External links

• "Interview with Tretchikoff's model for Chinese Girl" at Mail & Guardian
• "Gaze of the Green Lady" at BBC News
• Website about the life and paintings of "Vladimir Tretchikoff"