La señora Fiske Warren (Gretchen Osgood) y su hija Rachel

In the winter of 1903 John Singer Sargent set up a temporary studio inside Fenway Court, the Venetian-style palace that Isabella Stewart Gardner had just built in Boston to hold her art. Society came to him there. Among his sitters were Gretchen Osgood Warren, a Boston poet and singer, and her eldest daughter Rachel. Sargent posed them in heavy Renaissance armchairs, and for a backdrop he borrowed a 15th-century carved Madonna and Child. That sculpture shaped the pose: Rachel leans her head on her mother's shoulder the way the Christ Child leans on the Virgin. Sargent was near the peak of his fame as a portraitist and would soon tire of it, grumbling that painting faces on demand had become a kind of servitude.