Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac

In late 1902 Count Robert de Montesquiou, the Paris poet and aesthete Proust later drew on for his Baron de Charlus, sold his own portrait. A dealer placed it with Richard Canfield, an American who ran gambling houses and collected Whistler, for 60,000 francs, a year after the count had turned down an offer of 50,000. Whistler was hurt. He wrote to Montesquiou that a portrait acquired by a poet for a song had been resold for ten times the song. The sittings had begun in the spring of 1891 in Whistler's London studio and ran through countless sessions until the summer of 1892, when he finished the picture in a studio he was renting in Paris. Over the count's arm hangs a chinchilla cloak that belonged to his cousin, the Comtesse Greffulhe. Henry Clay Frick bought the portrait in 1914, and the sitter outlived him, dying in 1921, two years after Frick.