The Ladies Alexandra, Mary and Theo Acheson

London in 1902 was getting ready for a coronation. Edward VII was to be crowned that summer, and at the Royal Academy's spring exhibition Sargent showed eight pictures, this one among them. The commission almost certainly came from Louise, Duchess of Devonshire, a German-born countess nicknamed the Double Duchess because she had married two dukes in turn, first Manchester and then Devonshire. The three young women are her granddaughters, Alexandra, Mary and Theo Acheson, daughters of the Earl of Gosford, then aged between 19 and 23 and regular visitors to Chatsworth. Sargent went there in the winter before to plan the picture, and his first sketches caught the sisters playing golf. The finished canvas moves them somewhere else entirely, into satin gowns beside a garlanded urn, with one sister reaching up to pick oranges from the tree above. The arrangement draws on a group portrait Joshua Reynolds painted in 1773 of three sisters hanging flowers on a garden statue.