La Dame à la rose

In 1882 Sargent was 26 and hungry to be noticed, and this portrait did it. He showed it at the Paris Salon that spring and the critics fell for it. The sitter is Louise Burckhardt, daughter of a Swiss merchant in the painter's circle, holding a single rose against a plain dark ground with almost no colour beyond her pale dress. That stripped-back scheme comes straight from Velazquez, whom Sargent's teacher Carolus-Duran urged all his students to study. The novelist Henry James, a friend, said the picture had the slightly uncanny air of a talent that at the very start of its career had nothing left to learn. Burckhardt married soon after and died about ten years later, still in her twenties.