Ritratto di Madame Paul Poirson

By 1885 John Singer Sargent was leaving Paris under a cloud. His portrait of Madame Gautreau, the notorious Madame X, had been mocked at the Salon the year before, and his French clients were thinning out. In those lean months he was renting a studio from a man named Paul Poirson, and family history says he painted this portrait of Poirson's wife in place of the rent he owed. She stands tall and narrow against a cool blue-grey ground, her head turned toward you with a look that keeps its distance. Her name was Seymourina, the illegitimate daughter of an English marquess. Sargent gives her the elongated elegance he would soon make famous in London, where he moved for good that same year.