Henry Lee Higginson

The money for this portrait came from Harvard undergraduates. In 1903 they clubbed together to have Sargent paint Henry Lee Higginson, the Boston banker who had given them their union building two years earlier. Higginson had founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881 and had been covering its losses out of his own pocket ever since, and he had bought the university the playing fields at Soldiers Field, named for friends of his killed in the Civil War. He had served in that war as a major of cavalry and carried a sabre cut on his cheek from it. Sargent painted the scar plainly, laid the army cloak across his lap, and left the sitter's leather shoes worn down at the bottom of the canvas. He was 68 at the sittings.