Photograph by Thérèse Bonney circa 1930.  Copyright Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

I am always reminded of Gertrude Stein during this first week of February as she and I share a birthday — February 3. I love this photograph taken by Thérèse Bonney of Stein and Virgil Thomson reviewing the score for the opera he composed to her libretto, Four Saints in Three Acts. Conceived and written in Paris over several years beginning in the late 1920s, the opera premiered in Hartford, Connecticut in 1934 with fantastical sets and costumes designed by the American artist Florine Stettheimer. The photograph was shot at Stein’s much revered rue de Fleurus home and salon.