Portrait of Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts

In 1877 Sargent was 21 and still training in Paris when he sent this portrait of his childhood friend Fanny Watts to the Salon, the crowded yearly exhibition that could make a young painter's name. He had known her since they were children among the American families drifting through Europe. He seated her with one hand resting easily and gave her skin the soft light and feathery brushwork that would soon make him the portraitist London and Paris fought over. The jury accepted it. It was the first work he ever showed in public, and it now hangs in Philadelphia.