A Viscondessa de Poilloüe de Saint-Périer

In 1883 Sargent was still the toast of fashionable Paris, a year before his portrait of Madame X would nearly end his career there. This is the kind of commission that filled those good years: the young viscountess, Jeanne de Kergorlay, standing against a crimson curtain in a red ball gown, a garland of pale roses held in front of her. What the sitter could not know is how her story ends. In 1897 she was among the roughly 120 people, most of them society women, killed when the Bazar de la Charité, a Paris charity fair, caught fire and burned in minutes. She was 46.