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Sargent painted this around 1882, when he was in his mid-20s and still making his name in Paris. The sitter was not a paying client but a friend, Emma-Marie Allouard-Jouan, a writer and critic who moved in the same literary circles he did. He kept everything in muted greys, her dark dress and greying hair against a plain wall, the attention all on the intelligent, slightly tired face. Henry James, who knew Sargent, called it a masterly rendering of the look of experience, sensitive and a little faded. It was one of the unforced, private portraits he made of people he liked in those years, two before the scandal of the picture known as Madame X drove him out of Paris to London.