Cachemira

By 1908 John Singer Sargent was the most sought-after portraitist in the English-speaking world, and thoroughly sick of it. He had begun turning down commissions so he could paint what he liked on holiday, and this comes from a summer in the Italian Alps. Seven women move across the canvas in a slow procession, each swathed in a long Kashmiri shawl, arranged like figures on an ancient carved frieze. They are not seven different women at all. Every one of them is Sargent's niece Reine Ormond, around 11 years old, posed again and again in the same shawl until the group came together. He named the picture simply after the cloth the whole thing is built around, Cashmere.