Marie Buloz Pailleron (Madame Édouard Pailleron)

In the summer of 1879 a 23-year-old American was working outdoors in the Savoy hills, at a country estate called Ronjoux near Chambéry. That is where John Singer Sargent set up this tall, narrow canvas and painted Marie Buloz Pailleron on her own family's grounds, in the open air rather than a studio. She was the daughter of François Buloz, the editor who ran the literary journal Revue des Deux Mondes, and the wife of the playwright Édouard Pailleron, who had ordered the portrait. Painting a formal full-length like this out of doors was an ambitious thing to attempt, and Sargent was still five years from the Paris scandal over his portrait of Madame X, which nearly drove him out of the city. He sent this picture to the Salon of 1880. Two summers later he came back to the same family to paint the Pailleron children.