Grace Elvina, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston

Sargent had been refusing portrait commissions for years by then. From around 1907 he told clients he was finished with them, and in early 1925 nearly all his working time went into the murals for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He made an exception that January for Grace Curzon, an Alabama-born woman who had married the former Viceroy of India. Two months after the sittings her husband died. Four weeks after that Sargent died in London, on the eve of sailing for Boston, which leaves this the last oil portrait he finished. He worked the pose out in sketches now kept in Providence, Rhode Island. She perches on the edge of a sofa that has been turned away from us and twists back to meet the viewer, and the attention goes to her face and to the hands at her pearls.