ロックナウのアグニュー夫人

Gertrude Agnew was still recovering from a bad bout of influenza when she sat for John Singer Sargent in 1892, and some who look at this portrait read her slight pallor and heavy-lidded ease as the tiredness of a woman not yet fully well. Sargent finished the whole thing in about six sittings. She leans back in a French armchair against a shimmer of Chinese silk, both of them props kept in his London studio, and looks straight out at us with a directness that was unusual for a society portrait of the day. The white gown with its lilac sash is handled in long wet sweeps of the brush that you can still follow. When it was shown at the Royal Academy the next year the reviews were glowing, and it helped carry Sargent into the Academy itself. The sitter was not yet 30.