Patrice Felix Tchicaya first sat for Craigie Aitchison in the seventies. Patrice Felix Tchicaya, Paris is one of the earliest portraits of Tchicaya and most likely the first. Born in Paris in 1960, he is of Congolese descent and worked as a fashion photographer in the two-thousands. He changed his hair style between Aitchison’s various portraits, resulting in a varied group of work. Whereas Tchicaya is depicted in this work with an afro, another portrait of 1987–88 showed him with a hairstyle cropped close to the skull with a small bunch tied back in a knot, and the subsequent work of 1988 showed the sitter with a dense cluster of curls, several of which hang loose. In all cases, Aitchison paid careful attention to modulations in skin tone, observing the lighter tone around the eyes and nostrils.

Black sitters played a significant role in Aitchison’s career. In 1962, Georgeous Macauley was the first sitter to awaken the artist’s interest in black models, and Macauley was followed by others including Michael de Courcey, Carl Campbell, Alan McNaught, Naaotwa Swayne and Leroy Golding. Aitchison later justified his interest in skin colour to Andrew Gibbon Williams: ‘When people ask me why I only paint black people… I always ask them why they only paint white people.’ Aitchison also once explained that, beside his sitter’s black skin, other colours ‘jump’ forward. In Patrice Felix Tchicaya, Paris, the figure is screened against a background of white and pale blue.

As with other paintings by Aitchison, Patrice Felix Tchicaya, Paris marries simplicity of colour and line with a precise, measured placement of features. Speaking to Andrew Lambirth in 1989, Aitchison explained that his method of portraiture was adapted from his training at the Slade School of Art:

"I couldn’t paint portraits now unless I’d been to the Slade. Every time I start a portrait wherever I am I think I am in that room at the Slade. What they taught was all to do with getting the marks in the right place. It wasn’t to do with painting a mouth or an eye, it was putting a mark on a canvas in the right place as an equivalent to a mouth or an eye."

In line with this approach, each detail of Tchicaya’s face has a unique outline: the shape of each eye, the arc of each eyebrow, the flare of each nostril, the quivering line where the lips meet. Rather than rely on schematic symmetry, the use of measuring imbues these features with the appearance of something placed.