Eleanora O'Donnell Iselin (Mrs. Adrian Iselin)

In the spring of 1888 Sargent was near the end of his first working trip to America, months of portraits in Boston and New York. Two sisters, Georgine and Emily Iselin, commissioned this portrait of their mother, Eleanora, wife of the New York banker Adrian Iselin. The family remembered how the sitting began. Mrs. Iselin came into the drawing room followed by a maid carrying an armful of ball gowns, and asked which one he wanted her to wear. Sargent wanted none of them. He painted her exactly as she stood, and would not even let her take her hand off the table. That hand is still there, resting on the corner of a gilded Louis XVI table, a closed fan in the other. Some historians connect her stern look to that exchange. Asked late in life whether he remembered her, Sargent answered that he could never forget that dominating little finger.