Gitane espagnole

Sargent painted this when he was only 20, a student in Paris in the studio of Carolus-Duran, years before the famous portraits and the scandal of Madame X. The title is simply the Spanish word for a gypsy woman. Spain pulled at him long before he first traveled there, and he liked to paint dark-eyed, out-of-the-ordinary models rather than polite society sitters. He kept this canvas for himself for decades, hanging it in his London studio, and only let it go near the end of his life. In 1916 he sold it to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it still is.