Elizabeth Allen Marquand,

1887

When John Singer Sargent came from London to Newport, Rhode Island, in 1887 to paint Elizabeth Marquand, it was only his second visit to this country, and a reluctant one at that. Approached by the sitter’s husband, noted collector Henry G. Marquand, the artist quoted a discouragingly large fee, which when accepted left him no recourse but to embark on what turned out to be a highly productive phase of his career, largely due to the success of this picture. Widely admired for its restrained character — reassuringly unlike the artist’s scandalously risqué <em>Mme Gautreau (Madame X)</em> of 1885 — the Marquand portrait engendered numerous American commissions and was regarded by Sargent as "a turning point in [his] fortunes." Here, he suppresses the conspicuously virtuosic brushwork that made him the most fashionable portraitist in England and the United States, while retaining vestiges of the immediacy it affords. Mrs. Marquand is shown conservatively attired in a dark antique dress, seated in a chair of similarly aged design, in a composition that reflects the emerging appeal of the Colonial Revival while also implying the subject’s chaste character.