비커스 자매

Sargent painted these three daughters of a Sheffield steel family in 1884, the same year his portrait of Madame X caused a scandal at the Paris Salon and began pushing him out of France toward England. Colonel Thomas Vickers, who had made a fortune in armaments and steel, wanted his girls Florence, Mabel and Clara recorded together in the family house, and he stood by the commission even after the Paris uproar. When the picture was shown in London, a critic for the Times complained the sisters looked painted in a thin and almost ghostly fashion, barely finished portraits at all. That loose, rapid handling is exactly what later generations came to prize. The painting still belongs to the city of Sheffield, whose industrial wealth had paid for it.