The Countess of Warwick and Her Son

When Sargent painted her in 1905, Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, was 43, and her name was in the newspapers for reasons that had little to do with gowns. In the 1890s she had been the mistress of the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. In 1904 she joined the Social Democratic Federation, Britain's Marxist party, and put her money into its campaign for free school meals for poor children, which earned her the nickname the Red Countess. The portrait keeps all of that out of sight. She stands on a stone terrace in silver satin, and beside her, seated on the balustrade, is her son Maynard, born in 1898. The canvas is almost 2.7 metres tall. She kept it until 1913, when it passed to the London art dealer Asher Wertheimer, and it entered the Worcester Art Museum's collection that same year.