Una rosa

By 1907 the fashionable American portrait of a lady at leisure, paired with a delicate flower to echo her, was already a well-worn convention. Anshutz took it and gave it more spine. His sitter was Rebecca Whelen, daughter of a trustee at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he had taught for over 30 years and trained many of the artists who would go on to form the gritty Ashcan School. She sits in a rose-coloured dress, upright and self-possessed, so that the rose of the title is as much the woman as any bloom. He owed his sense of structure to his own teacher, Thomas Eakins, and his loose, bright brushwork to painters like Sargent.