Between 1914 and 1915 he and his family were interned during a stay in France. In 1916 he worked in the press office on the Serbian front where he met Kokoschka. After 1919, he worked mainly in pastel crayons and concentrated on portraits. In his autobiographical writings called "Reminiscences", the artist recalls the painting "Woman in a White Speckled Dress" as his first important step on the road to becoming a painter, a painting in which he found his own style and liberated himself from the great master, Mihály Munkáczy. Rippl's large-scale and rectangular paintings from the 1890's frequently depict only a single figure (Woman with Cage, 1892; Slender Woman with Vase, 1894; My Grandmother, 1894).