Martha Dana (later Mrs. William Mercer)

Martha Dana was in her twenties and still unmarried when she sat for Anders Zorn in 1899. She was the daughter of Charles Stratton Dana, of an old Boston family, and the sitting took place in the Back Bay house of the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, who arranged a number of portrait commissions for the Swedish painter. He shows her to the waist under a tall black hat, a dark jacket open over a white blouse and a large white bow. The museum points to the quick, loose strokes and the bright accents of colour he used to catch what it calls a modern beauty.

She later married William Robert Mercer, a painter from Doylestown in Pennsylvania, and together they designed a house there in the Tudor style, which they called Aldie. In 1928 she gave this portrait to the Museum of Fine Arts. After her husband's death she arranged for her estate to be shared in three equal parts between the museum, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Arnold Arboretum, the arboretum's share given in her father's name.