Dorothy

Sargent painted this in London in 1900, at the point where he could barely keep up with the commissions coming in. The sitter is Dorothy Williamson, a small child, granddaughter of George Millar Williamson, a New York collector who had been one of his first American patrons. Sargent worked straight onto the canvas without preparatory drawings, and with a child who would not sit still he had to move fast, which is why the dress and the background are left as open brushmarks. The next year it went to New York for the Society of American Artists exhibition, where the critic of the New York Times picked it out, writing that the portraits were led easily by little Miss Dorothy in the Vanderbilt Gallery. Within a few years Sargent was turning down portrait commissions almost entirely and giving his time to watercolours and to mural work. It has been in the Dallas Museum of Art since 1982.