Matisse ran a teaching studio in Paris, the Académie Matisse, from 1908 until 1911, though he became progressively less interested in his professorial duties as those years went on^[2]. Few of his students were French; his classes drew a mixed international group that included the German painter Hans Purrmann, who had arrived in Paris to see a Manet exhibition and stayed on, converted by the Fauve paintings he saw there, to become both a pupil and a lasting friend^[1][2]. From all accounts Matisse's teaching was traditional in character, focused on giving his students a firm classical grounding rather than pushing them toward his own radical style^[2]. Sarah Stein, another pupil and a respected friend of the artist, recorded notes from his weekly atelier criticisms in 1908; they were not published until 1951, as an appendix to Alfred Barr's monograph on Matisse, but stand as a rare direct record of how he taught^[2].

Greta Moll left her own written reminiscences of Matisse, published in a German periodical, and gave further testimony on the making of this specific portrait in a letter to Alfred Barr and in a later article describing the stages of its fabrication^[1]. Hans Purrmann, in his own separately published recollections of the artist, left an account of the portrait's making as well, giving two independent viewpoints, sitter and fellow pupil, on how the picture took shape^[1].

Matisse's portraits from this period, however finished and confident they look, were rarely produced quickly. He is recorded, on being challenged by a sceptical interviewer over whether his work was hurried, showing fifty separate drawings made in preparation for a single portrait, plus additional studies of movement and composition^[2]. His portrait of his own wife from a few years later required scores of sittings and repeated revision before he judged it complete^[2]. There is no reason to think Moll's portrait was made any differently: sustained observation, redrawn and reworked, sat behind the picture's apparently direct and economical final image.