Nonchaloir (Ruhe)

By 1911 John Singer Sargent had walked away from the society portraits that made him rich and famous, worn out by the vanity of his sitters. Freed from commissions, he painted people close to him for pleasure. The languid young woman here, sunk into a sofa under a shimmering grey shawl, is his niece Rose-Marie Ormond, a favourite model of his late years. He first called the picture Nonchalance, then softened it to the French Nonchaloir, a quieter word for idle ease. There is a hard coda to her story. Seven years later, on Good Friday in 1918, Rose-Marie was killed in Paris when a German long-range shell struck the church where she sat, among the last civilians to die in the war.