Carmela Bertagna

Sargent painted this in Paris around 1880, in his early twenties, in the same stretch of years that took him south to Spain and Morocco. He had come up through the studio of Carolus-Duran and was beginning to get portrait commissions, but this was not one. It is a studio head made from a hired model, the kind of thing Paris painters produced steadily to keep their hand in. Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, who catalogued his complete paintings, give it the number 16, which puts it among the first works he made as a professional. The odd part is the title. Most of the models who sat in Paris studios in those years are anonymous on museum walls today, and what survives of this one is her name, Carmela Bertagna, and nothing else.