[Seated woman]

Rothko used this drawing as a preparatory source for a canvas, Seated Woman, a view of a woman with braided hair sitting with her legs crossed in a green armchair (fig. 1). Edith, Rothko’s wife, reportedly favored a long braid, and they had a green armchair in the living room of their apartment at 1000 Park Place, Brooklyn, where they moved in the fall of 1933 upon returning from a summer trip to Portland, Oregon. Seated Woman was included in an exhibition at Contemporary Arts in New York that opened on November 21, 1933. This drawing, therefore, was almost surely made sometime between September and November of that year.