Arrangement in Braun und Schwarz: Porträt von Miss Rosa Corder

Whistler named his portraits the way a composer names music, so this one is an Arrangement in Brown and Black before it is a likeness of anyone. The sitter was real enough. Rosa Corder was a painter herself and the companion of Whistler's dealer, and the story goes that he caught sight of her one day in Chelsea in a brown dress, passing in front of a dark door, and built the whole picture out of that single accident of colour. She stands in sharp profile against a near-black ground, her figure nearly dissolving into it. She later said she sat for it something like 40 times, sometimes standing until she almost fainted, while Whistler kept hunting the exact brown he remembered from the street.