リブルズデール卿

Sargent painted this in 1902, near the close of the long Victorian age, and it became a kind of portrait of a whole class. The sitter is Thomas Lister, Lord Ribblesdale, shown in his own worn hunting clothes rather than robes of state, tall and lean and faintly haughty. Sargent had wanted to paint him for years, ever since hearing him give a speech, and he stretched the figure taller still to sharpen that aristocratic air. The picture came to be nicknamed the Ancestor. There is a sadness behind the poise the paint could not have known. Ribblesdale was the fourth and last of his line. Both his sons died young in wars overseas, one in Somaliland and one at Gallipoli, and the title died with the family.