The owner tells the history of this charming portrait:

"My parents acquired [the Peirce] in Paris in October, 1930 in the following manner:

"Peirce and my father were friends in the heady days of American expatriates in Paris. On the day that my mother and father were married my father father encountered Peirce in a favorite cafe. He said, OEWaldo, congratulate me I just got married, to which Peirce replied "Kenneth, congratulate me. I just had twins.o/oo Peirce then invited my father, a journalist named Kenneth campbell, to choose a picture as a wedding present. My father, knowing little about art but liking the portrait of a French country policeman painted in a small town on the Riviera called Cagnes-sur-Mer complete with medals won in World War I took the [present] portrait.

"The woman by whom Peirce had the twins became his third wife and is pictured with the twins, Mike and Bill, in a charming picture which used to hang in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art called Haircut by the Sea...

"You now know all that I know of the history of the painting. My parents kept it hanging on their living room wall until their deaths when it came to me.o/oo