El señor y la señora I. N. Phelps Stokes

Sargent painted this double portrait in 1897 as a wedding present for a young New York couple, the architect Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes and his wife Edith. The plan kept changing. First Edith was to pose alone in an evening gown, then standing beside a Great Dane in her sporty day clothes. When the borrowed dog became unavailable, her husband simply took the animal's place, which is why he stands half in shadow behind her while she strides forward in a crisp white skirt and jacket, hand on hip, looking straight out. That confident, athletic pose read at the time as the image of the modern American woman, and it is Edith, not the man who commissioned the portrait, who commands the whole canvas.