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The face of Rivera’s painted woman was based on Olympic gold medalist Helen Wills, but the character is inspired by “The Adventures of Esplandián,” a 16th century novel by Castilian author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo.

The suffragists’ protest had the loosest relationship to art, since there was no reason why people could not enjoy looking at a Velázquez piece and also support votes for women, but in the aftermath, Richardson eloquently contrasted newspaper readers’ horror at damage done to a painted woman with their previous indifference to the damage done to a living body.

Her parents named her Ada because Ada Katz, the wife of artist Alex Katz and, by some counts, the most painted woman of the 20th century, told them at a dinner party, “I’ve always thought Ada was a nice name.”

You can imagine the impact of the fall causing irreparable fissures in the paint; you can imagine oils from the handler’s fingers degrading the pigments; you can imagine his thumb carelessly poking a hole through the painted woman.

Then when he thought of the weary painted woman and her thick lips, his heart swelled with sickness and anger and he sat there muttering to himself.