Portrait de Mrs. Cecil Wade

Two years earlier, at the Paris Salon of 1884, Sargent had shown a portrait of a Parisian beauty with one gown strap slipping from her shoulder. The outcry was bad enough that his French sitters melted away, and by 1886 he had crossed to London to start over. This is one of the commissions that rebuilt him there. Frances Wade, a Glasgow-born stockbroker's wife of 23, sits in white satin, the very dress she had worn to be presented at court to Queen Victoria, brought out again for the painter. He places her a little off-centre on a red-cushioned settee, a white fan resting in one hand, the pale silk doing most of the work.