La Carmencita

Carmen Dauset Moreno, a Spanish dancer known on stage as La Carmencita, took New York by storm in 1890, performing night after night in a music hall on 23rd Street. John Singer Sargent, dazzled, called her a bewildering superb creature and coaxed her to pose, though she proved a restless and demanding sitter. He even staged a private performance of her dancing in the studio of his friend, the painter William Merritt Chase. Sargent shows her here in a stiff pale gold gown, chin lifted, one hand at her hip, caught mid-swagger rather than mid-step. Reviewers in London disliked it, but in 1892 the French state bought the picture, and that purchase helped seal Sargent's standing in Paris.