Mrs. Charles E. Inches (Louise Pomeroy)

The red evening gown Louise Inches wears here was an American copy of a design by the Paris couturier Worth, and it was made with panels that could be taken out, so that it would still fit through her pregnancies. When she sat for Sargent in Boston in 1887 she was in her mid-twenties, the mother of two small sons, and expecting a third child. He gave most of his attention to her face and long neck and painted the dress and arms faster and more loosely. On Christmas Eve that year Edward Boit, her husband's cousin and an old friend of the painter, went round to the couple's house on Charles Street to see it and called it a beautiful picture. Boston talked. One society woman wrote to Isabella Stewart Gardner that Mrs. Inches looked as if she would bring you the head of Holofernes for the asking, casting her as the biblical Judith. The dress itself still survives, in a private collection.