The Virgin

Sargent painted this small Virgin and Child in 1897 and then kept it. It was still in his studio when he died in London in April 1925, and that July it went under the hammer at Christie's with the rest of his studio contents, as lot 221. A New York dealer, Arthur Newton, bought it. Some time after 1929 it passed to a Mrs. Barbour and then to her daughter Ruth, the wife of Harold Lamb, a writer of popular histories of Genghis Khan and the Crusades, who lived in Beverly Hills. Their son Frederick inherited the painting in 1986, and he left it to the Museum of Fine Arts, which received it in 1998, a little over a century after Sargent painted it.